By RACHAEL KOENIG
From the outside, I may not look like someone who’d be littered with permanent skulls and bats under her conventional exterior. But my body art is an expression of who I once was and who I still am.
Once upon a time, as I found myself maneuvering through an especially thorny patch of my adolescence, when I was watching too many John Hughes movies and breathing in the fumes of too many fruity-smelling erasers, I decided to become a Goth. Already on my third teenage year, I decided I had enough angst under my belt to proclaim to the world what a melancholic and morose young person I was.
Not a REAL Goth, mind you—the kind that listens to the Cure and the Smiths and acts a bit deviant by smoking cigarettes and wearing black lipstick, but rather I was a Pseudo Goth Lite—the kind that watches Beetlejuice too often and routinely wears a sweater with a small embroidered unicorn over the left breast pocket, because it happens to be the only black article of clothing in one’s closet.
In order to truly be a Goth, I needed to have the right accessories. The list included black eyeliner, a heavy ornate cross, and some sort of shirt made out of black netting. And maybe a heavy dark veil, for when the weather was cool. I imagined myself a forlorn Winona Ryder: misunderstood, dark, brooding, and in a constant state of sorrow, all while looking extremely avant garde and fashionable.
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20 years ago my now hubby went out and got a tat on his chest. I was mortified and nearly broke up with him over it. Now - I think they're sexy if done with meaning and are tasteful. He has yet to expand his collection but I've chosen the tat I want. It represents my Mum. She died never getting the tat she wanted and she was the last person you'd think would get one! I have 3 tat's in mind. One for my Mum and then my kids names. That's it. The only thing stopping me - $$$'s! I'm in my late 30's and will have the tat for my Mum in the next 6 months hopefully.
I'm in my 20s and have toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo, but I don't think my needle phobia/low pain tolerance would be able to handle it. My parents have also said they'd throw me out of the house if I got one, because to them tattoos scream 'bogan'.
There's nothing meaningful enough I want tattooed on me anyway. If I competed in the Olympics I would get the Olympic rings tattooed, but theres about a 0% chance of that happening lol