Thread: Ink.

Imagine, asking advice on a tattoo from a shaving forum, hah.

Fortunately I've come to realize that the members of this board are more often eccentric, been around the bush, non-typical open minded people. So- here goes.

So, I want to get a tattoo for my eighteenth birthday this twenty-second of april. This is when the crowd sighs, and starts talking about the- It's for life, maybe you don't want it, wait till your older, you don't want to look like a (fill in the blank) and such wonderful advice. But, before that particular line of thought starts to gain momentum I want to explain to you what I want my tattoo to look and feel like and the story, good and bad, behind the ink (quite literally).

So, back in sophomore year, I had a creative writing class. One of the assignments was to write either a book report or a fictional book report of how a character is shaped by the problems and/or inner turmoil in the story. I agonized over this. I am a damn good writer, but I hate any sort of prompted writing. My best writing is when I write for fun, and it ruins it for me to have to meet anyone's expectations, particularly sports-oriented semi-illiterate Highschool English teachers. So, I wrote a generic character report on Tom Sawyer, got an A, and then I decided to do some REAL character assessment and creative writing on my own purely for my own entertainment. Lacking a real decent book character, I decided I'd write about my self and kind of keep it going as journal, both to help my self in my personal life to analyze who I am and where I want to go and who I want to end up being in the end, and to see just what kind of writing I could do for my self versus what someone else wanted me to write.

So I wrote about how I changed over the years, about some of the big things in my early childhood that shaped who I am, about crushes, cars, hunting, dirtbiking, teachers, friends and almost everything that had an impact on my life and what I thought about it. Unfortunately the biggest cliches among all these things were suicide. Starting when I was very little in 2001, my brother shot him self in the heart, and it has been an ongoing horror story in life, the most recent being a dear friend, Cody this last February on Valentines Day. It drove me back to this "Character Assessment" that I've kept this entire time, where I keep a list and some words about each and every friend or family member I've lost to this madness along with my own personal thoughts and feelings and turmoil about suicide. Reading through it and counting the names and dates listed there was shocking to me. Nine friends, and one brother. Aside from my brother, in a matter of a little over 2 years, most being as close as 2 months apart.

I couldn't help but remember how close I was on several occasions, particularly on my way home from the funerals of some of my closest friends I grew up with and went to church, school, video game parties, sleep overs and lived with, to following in my brothers footsteps.I was feeling pretty shitty, so I voiced these concerns to my girlfriend. and while we talked and I told her about my resolve to never attempt such an act and how I learned how hard this is on friends, family, and particularly little brothers and fathers when a young man does this to himself. While we were speaking I had picked up a pencil and was drawing on the surface of the counter top.

In the drawing was a man, and over his heart there was no skin and bone, but iron bars of a cage with a padlock, inside was his heart and written below below the cage was "I chose the long road."

I had just drawn my exact feelings. I had decided that suicide wasn't an option and that cage with my heart inside of it was my symbolic decision that no matter what life throws at me, how hard things would get, I had chosen to take the long road and that I couldn't break that promise any more then I could break the lock to the cage, and as long as my heart was safe in its cage I could keep moving forward.


So, what do you guys think? It with be an anatomical heart, inside the cage, the bars made to look like they're part my body and you're looking into it and a padlock securing the gate of the cage, and maybe but undecided yet the words "I chose the long(er?) road." beneath it. It would be spared no expense and would be done by a phenomenal artist by the name of Christian Buckingham. I've been thinking a lot lately I think this would be a good tribute to both my resolve and my friends and family I've lost to suicide. It would be tattooed as close as reasonably possible over my actual heart.