The Tattoo Your Future Self Thanks You For
The sound of waves was your alarm clock this morning, a blissful moment you’d been waiting for. Your friends knock at your hotel room door, calling you out to the beach, margaritas waiting. Turning towards the door, towards the beautiful day ahead, you pass by the bathroom mirror. A deep breath in, and the swimsuit cover comes off. A bikini and a body you are now second-guessing. You pause there longer than you meant to as your friends knock one more time. “Coming!” As you turn, your tattoo catches your eye, and it’s absolutely beautiful. You’d almost forgotten it was there. The way it complements your curves, it feels like it was always meant to be there. “I do look good.” And the hotel door closes behind you, your swimsuit cover forgotten on the bathroom counter.
You reach for the best suit in your closet as you rehearse a list of carefully crafted lines over and over, hands shaking from too much coffee and nerves. Today is the day, and this meeting could change everything. Your mind buzzes between potential, anticipation, and doubt. In the moment that you gingerly remove the jacket from its hanger and right before you put it on, your eyes stop on your tattoo. Strength and faith. Your thoughts quiet, your breaths deepen, and the jacket slides on. A new sense of confidence fills out the suit. The doubt feels smaller now. You grab your keys, standing straighter with every step.
The lights illuminating the dark parking lot blur together through the tears, tears that won’t stop. You left for some air, and need to be on your way back soon, but the deep sadness is still swallowing you. At the back of the empty parking lot, life in this moment feels really hard. But your sleeve falls away just so, and your tattoo sits there. In the place you intended, for moments like this. When you needed it most. You sigh that uniquely staggered sigh after a good cry, and you manage to wipe your tears dry. Your chest fills with air and your shoulders lift. You reach forward and start the car.
You deserve tattoos that your future self thanks you for. Moments like these are part of what makes tattoos such profoundly powerful mediums of expression. Moments that can be engineered to do exactly what you need them to, for the rest of your life.
What Makes a Tattoo Your Future Self Will Love
This is the ideal. A tattoo your future self will love isn't an accident — it's an intention.
Tattoos are the ultimate form of creative agency: I get to decide who I am, and who I’m becoming, and to mark it on my body.
No matter what has happened to me, this is a choice I am making. Those who have suffered through loss of bodily freedom through policing, abuse, or medicalization felt more empowered by their exercise of agency through collecting tattoos. Being alive is hard. Life, sometimes, feels like it’s just happening to us. Tattoos can help us feel like we determine our own fate again.
Just as life challenges all of us with the honor of waking up in the morning, everyone has a body. Not everyone has a peaceful and happy relationship with it. Collecting tattoos has been shown to reduce anxiety about your body and your appearance, fostering a relationship of self-love and positive self-affirmation. In a world that tests your sense of self-love in a thousand different directions, pulled by capitalistic branding and shareholder expectations, a tattoo is a radical statement of self-belief.
I believe that tattoos are one of the ultimate practices of creative embodiment, whether or not you identify as “creative”.
A tattoo can be, and should be, whatever it is you need it to be. “I want to look at my arm and laugh,” “I need reminders of my strength,” “I want to feel beautiful,” “My body should hold layers of meaning,” or “That’s cool dude, let’s tattoo it.” That’s the beauty here, it is pure freedom exercised in real time. Isn’t it special to be human with so many creative choices? Choices that exercise their felt power for not only your present, but also your future self?
When you collect a tattoo, you gain invisible admission to a secret society. Ok, not very secret, but you start seeing people differently. You stand in line at Starbucks and look at exposed skin like never before: that tattoo is beautiful, that placement looks painful, is that a full back-piece peeking out from her shirt? Brave! You admire people for not only their creative statements, but also their strength and resilience. And, even if subtle, you relate to them in a way that's softened. You are part of the same club. Bold and expressive enough to say something on your skin.
Certainly, this exists on a spectrum. I always tell my clients who embark on the journey to collect distinctly large and painful pieces like full sleeves or back pieces, that their tattoos speak for them now. You belong to a relatively small group of people who had an idea, went through dozens of hours of suffering for them, and made it through on the other side, looking all the while cooler because of it. You admire their strength, you see them in a new light, just as they surely now see themselves. I can do hard things, things that push me to my limit over and over again, and I can persevere.
This is the reverent magnificence of tattoos, an ancient, turned modern-day, ritualistic process of self-empowerment and embodiment.
They exist so distinctly, on a changing body, throughout chapters of time. Tattoos don’t have to be anything, tattoos don’t follow any hard and fast rules, but ideally tattoos will be decisions that your future self thanks you for. Even if the relationship to them changes, which is a near inevitability, the hope is that you see them for what they are worth: you trying to be ever more yourself.
Can you tell that I think tattoos are part magic? That magic is something I want everyone to experience: immense gratitude for yourself for making such a damn good decision. The support that the Body as Story framework gives is so we can make that magic more reliable than accidental.
Body as Story was never developed to exist within the silo of regret prevention, but as a support mechanism for the best-case scenario for tattoos. This framework isn't about avoiding bad outcomes, but helping to ensure the good outcomes are more inevitable. Everyone deserves tattoos that they look back on fondly. "I may have changed, but this tattoo feels like me."
Imagine living in your body 10 years from now, looking down, catching a glimpse in the mirror, seeing something you creatively curated, and that you love even more than ever before.
Let’s conceptualize a collection that does exactly that.
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