I remember the first time I really understood why someone would permanently put a mountain on their body. A friend of mine had just come back from a solo trip through Oregon’s Three Sisters Wilderness. She didn’t say much about it when she got home, but three weeks later she sat down with a licensed…
I have wanted a wave tattoo for longer than I have wanted most things in my life. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, close enough to the coast that the sound of water felt like a baseline hum I only noticed when it was missing. When I finally got my first tattoo at eighteen,…
There’s something that happens the moment you start seriously imagining a snake tattoo on your body. It stops feeling like a passing thought and starts feeling like something you already know. That quiet certainty is usually where the real planning begins, and it’s also where the questions rush in: What style is right for me?…
There is something about bird tattoos that keeps pulling people back to them. I have seen it with my own friends, and I have felt it myself. You start saving images without quite knowing why, and then one day you realize you have thirty pins and they are all birds. A delicate swallow on a…
There is a reason animal tattoos are some of the most-pinned, most-searched, and most-beloved designs in the world. Animals carry weight. They carry story. Long before tattooing became a modern art form, people were marking themselves with the creatures they admired most, creatures they felt a kinship with, creatures that represented something they were either…
I still remember the first time I really looked at a butterfly tattoo, not just glanced at it, but looked at it properly. It was on someone’s forearm at a coffee shop, a single fine-line monarch with shaded wings so delicate they looked like they had been pressed from the inside of the skin rather…