Emilie Kushner
Senior Editor
The days of doodling on your hands, bored in class, worried only slightly about ink poison, are long gone. But for some students, their love of pen-drawn tattoos and clip-on earrings have followed them to today.
After a year of drawing the same infinity symbol on the inside of her middle finger, junior Margaret Williamson decided she wanted the real thing. She also has nine piercings on one ear and four on the other. While you need to be 18 or have parental consent to get a tattoo or piercing, Margaret’s parents were more than willing. “My parents don’t mind about the piercings, they think it’s fun!” she said. “I get good grades so the tattoo was an award.”
Margaret’s piercings and tattoo mean a lot to her as well. “The piercings are just a fun experience, and the infinity symbol means live life to the fullest,” she said.
Senior Alison Soderquist, who originally wanted an upper lip ring (known as a Monroe), opted for a lower lip piercing. Deciding what piercing she wanted proved difficult. “I had to consider that some surface piercings may reject, and ruled out things like an anti-brow (a cheekbone surface piercing),” she said. “I also wanted something that I consider to be feminine: I see lip rings as feminine and things like eyebrow rings as masculine.”
Like Margaret, Alison’s decision to get a piercing was supported. “My mom actually took me to the shop!” she said.
Alison’s piercings are permanent, but also allow her to express herself on a day-to-day basis. “I can change it to any color to suit my mood; I tend to stick with my basic red and black though,” she said.
Junior Caroline Gehnrich embraces both piercings and tattoos, having a tattoo on the side of her rib cage, as well as “tunnels,” more commonly know as gauges. Just as Alison had a hard decision on where to get her piercing, Caroline had a difficult time deciding where to put her tattoo. “I ended up talking to one of my uncle’s brothers who is into tattoos and he said that it would look good on my side, even though it would hurt!” she said.
Unlike Margaret and Alison, Caroline struggled to get permission for her tattoo. “My mom at first was against it; she’s not into the whole piercing, tattoo, hair dying thing,” she said. “But once I had my heart set on something that meant a lot to the both of us she finally caved.”
For Caroline, her tattoo is more than just a form of expression: she got it in honor of her dad. However, she still searched for the right words to explain to others why she wanted a tattoo. “I finally came across this quote which was exactly the words I couldn’t get out of myself: ‘My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story.’ Johnny Depp,” she said.
This is only the beginning of Caroline’s tattoo and piercing journey. “I’ll be 18 next December and I for sure have trips to the tattoo shop planned,” she said. “As of right now, I have an idea of something I want on my thigh, a chest piece, and I’ve been dying to get spider bites.”
Within the halls of NCHS, students are not the only ones who are expressing themselves. English teacher Hannah Magnan has her nose pierced and three tattoos: two on her arm and one on her leg.
Ms. Magnan’s parents gave her the impression that piercings and tattoos would be acceptable if they were hidden. “Initially (at least for the first two), I chose places that would either be acceptable or invisible to my parents,” she said. “However, my parents were pretty progressive. My mother took me to get a few piercings in high school, so it wasn’t too many years before I took that as a sign that they would forgive me for a tattoo that couldn’t be hidden.”
However, her parents weren’t entirely happy with the idea of tattoos. “I wish I had talked to my parents about the tattoos before I got them,” she said. “They probably wouldn’t have been able to talk me out of them, but it would have minimized the stress, and maybe they could’ve talked me into thinking longer about my choices.”
For Ms. Magnan, each tattoo serves a little lesson. “The first one is a reminder not to make permanent commitments out of youthful naivete, just because I think I am precocious,” she said. “The second and third taught me that no matter how old I get, I will always look back on my former self as young and naive and my present self as worldly and mature – completely qualified to make sweeping permanent decisions for my future self.”
Ms. Magnaan’s tattoos are somewhat of a scrapbook to her. “It reminds me of the multitude of lives I’ve had, the different people I’ve been,” she said. “And all those people were pretty cool, even if I don’t know them so well anymore: one was artsy and rebellious; one was full of cheerfully oblivious advice; one loved serenity and poetry.”
“I think tattoos are really almost completely about vanity,” she said. “It’s just permanent body makeup, or choosing the (ideally) perfectly flattering accessory to wear every day FOREVER.”
