In spite of the stigma, these neighbors mark their memories and milestones with ink
John Peterson lives in a ranch-style home near White Rock Lake. He spends his weekdays convincing the wealthy to entrust their money to his investment firm. And he is a faithful churchgoer who is committed to his wife, newborn son and others above everything else in his life.
Just looking at Peterson, his neighbors would never guess that he has tattoos.
That’s right — tattoos. Not the kind that stick on with water and scrub off with soap, but the kind that required Peterson to walk into a place with a name like “House of Pain” and ask a pierced-up, ink-covered artist to repeatedly stick a needle into his skin.
Peterson didn’t get his tattoos on a college dare, or after one too many margaritas, or during a wild streak before he settled down into married life and started having children. He’s not a businessman by day and a biker by night.
For Peterson and others like him in our neighborhood, tattoos are personal and meaningful. In their view, body art imitates life.
“No matter who you are, you judge at first sight — ‘He’s got a tattoo,’ or, ‘Who is this progressive freak who has an earring?’ I like to challenge those judgments,” Peterson says. “I have tattoos because I like them.”
Not that he flashes them around — especially not at work. Most people who get tattoos for personal reasons, including Peterson, are more discreet about it. Their goal is not to show them off but to appreciate them privately — though they probably wouldn’t hesitate to chat about their tats if someone asked.
Their subtlety makes these people even more of an enigma. They sit on our PTA committees, sing in our church choirs and frequent our breakfast joints. These neighbors challenge us to think differently about body art by bucking the notion that tattoos are either a youthful indiscretion, a drunken mistake or an affiliation with the so-called “tattoo culture.” The only box they fit into is the one marked “none of the above,” and that’s what makes their stories intriguing.
Lovebirds for all time
Kim Dates works in sales and marketing for Janimation, a digital creative studio, and so does her husband, one of the company’s creative directors. They met at a New Year’s Eve party and within a year were discussing marriage.
Around the same time, they saw a TV show that told the story of a gay man in California whose late partner loved hummingbirds. Even though hummingbirds weren’t indigenous to the area in which they lived, he planted a garden in an attempt to attract them, but never had any success. When he died, the couple’s friends came to the house for a wake. Suddenly, a hummingbird appeared in the garden, and the man decided it was his partner reincarnated.
The story touched Dates, and since she has always loved hummingbirds, she decided to get two tattooed on her lower back —a blue one for her husband, and a pink one for her.
“If I come back, I’ll come back as a hummingbird, and he’ll know it’s me,” she says.
Of course, Dates’ husband takes a lighter approach to her body art.
“He always says he wants to come back as a cockroach, which I’ll probably kill when I see it,” she laughs.
The hummingbirds aren’t Dates’ first tattoo. The initial one happened right after college when Dates was living in Houston. Her best friend, Courtney, already had quite a few — “I think she’s covered from head to toe now,” Dates says — and had always tried to persuade Dates to join her at the tattoo studio. Wanting Courtney to visit her in Houston, Dates promised her that if she showed up before the end of the year, she would do it.
The day before New Year’s Eve, Dates’ phone rang. It was Courtney.
“She called and said, “Guess what? I’m here. Let’s go,” Dates says.
Sticking to her promise, Dates allowed an artist to tattoo a vine around her thigh. She wasn’t exactly happy with the results, but even now, at age 31, she doesn’t really regret it. The tattoo evokes thoughts of Courtney and her spontaneity — the kind that could involve waking up one morning and deciding to go to Paris — and reminds Dates not to take life too seriously.
“If I had to do it over again, I would still do it,” Dates says, “but I would do something different.”
And Dates say she doesn’t plan to get any more tattoos, except perhaps baby hummingbirds once she has children.
Timeless, not trendy
Nothing about Melissa Carpenter’s tattoo is flashy. It’s monotone, no more than an inch in diameter and placed subtly on the inside of her wrist.
Carpenter grew up in Dallas but had the tattoo done while she lived in Los Angeles, where “everybody and their dog has a tattoo,” she says. She found it while flipping through a thick book of symbols. It is the triquetra, an ancient Christian symbol composed of three interlocked ichthus, more commonly known as “Jesus fish.” Its triangular shape symbolizes the Trinity — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — and the Celtic Christian church uses it most often.
Even before Carpenter read the description of the triquetra, she was drawn to it. It wasn’t until she returned home that she realized it was embossed on the cover of a Bible she had owned since high school. That’s when she decided to put it on her wrist.
“I don’t like piercings, except for my ears, and I don’t really have any strong reason why I had to have one — I just wanted one,” she says. “And I wanted something that would be timeless and mean something to me. I didn’t want a trend.”
That was six years ago. Carpenter is now 35, back in Dallas, consulting for Arbonne and staying at home to care for her 9-month-old son. Her tattoo, though tiny, still garners some attention. Most people think it’s “cool,” she says, and others don’t give it a second thought. But Carpenter says it has never generated a negative response.
The most common misperception, Carpenter believes, is that people who get tattoos don’t know what they are doing and don’t give it any thought — for them, it’s just a trendy thing to do. Carpenter also thinks it’s important to recognize that for many people, tattoos are a form of expression, though she can’t say the same for herself.
“I wasn’t trying to say anything to anybody, and I could care less about what anybody thinks about my tattoo” Carpenter says. “I like it, and I like looking at it.”
Put it behind you
Beverly Geurian admits she was too young when she got her first tattoo at 16. She and a friend wanted to do something crazy, and decided to get matching kiss imprints on their backsides.
“We didn’t really research it, and we weren’t happy with it, but we didn’t have to pay for it because we were cute,” she laughs.
That was it for Geurian, at least for the next 17 years while she was married to someone she now describes as “controlling.” When she divorced him at age 33, she decided to cover her old tattoo with something more meaningful.
She had always collected Texas memorabilia, so she settled on a depiction of the state of Texas with a rebel flag flying through it.
Geurian calls the image her “scream of freedom — something I could do and nobody could tell me I couldn’t do it.”
And she didn’t stop there. Not long afterward, Geurian decided she wanted the words “soul mate” written in Chinese symbols across her back. There wasn’t a new man in her life — the soul mate the tat refers to is Guerin herself. The person for whom she’s a soul mate simply hasn’t found her yet, she says.
Geurian, now 37, is considering one more tattoo. She has four children altogether, and wants a vine on her lower back composed of their names. All she needs, she says, is the right artist to design it.
Fired up
During John Peterson’s years at Baylor University, he watched as his soccer team buddies had soccer balls tattooed on their ankles — “really cheesy,” Peterson scoffs — and ribbed his brother for getting a tattoo with fraternity letters.
It’s not that Peterson thought tattoos were stupid; he’d wanted one since he was 15 or 16. But he wanted something original.
“It’s a pretty big investment — and I really don’t do anything on a whim,” he says.
Except for his first tattoo, he did just that. Two years ago, while on his honeymoon, he and his wife were walking down the dirt roads of Playa del Carmen, and Peterson suddenly exclaimed that he wanted a wedding band tattoo. He made the spontaneous decision, he says, because everything in his world was perfect at that moment. He also recalls his grandmother once telling him that people don’t fight long enough to stay married.
“This is my commitment to fight long enough,” he says.
Peterson’s wife, knowing her husband’s affinity for fire, suggested he put flames inside the band. The tiny blue blazes he chose were a sign of tattoos to come.
“I’ve got this thing with flames — I don’t know what it is,” he says. “I wish there was a really cool story to go behind it. I used to love fire as a kid, but I never set anybody’s house on fire or anything like that.”
The idea for a flames tattoo had been rolling around in his head for some time, but Peterson kept putting it off. As he approached 30, newly married and almost ready to start a family, he decided it was now or never. So he found a tattoo artist who created mirror images of flames climbing up Peterson’s feet. The shades of red, yellow and orange resembled something out of a hot rod catalog.
“I would never ever put them on a vehicle I own, but I tattoo myself with them,” Peterson grins.
At his investment firm, no one ever sees the tattoos — especially his clients.
“I try to cover this up because I’m sitting here asking a guy for a couple million dollars, and I always want to come across as a clean-cut, presentable guy,” he says.
The only place Peterson makes it a point to wear flip-flops is to church.
“One of the stereotypes in the Christian community is it’s khakis and nice polo shirt with your hair combed just right, and if you love Jesus, this is what you’re like,” he says. “There’s so much more to it.”
Peterson admits that he flashes his flame tattoos around church because he believes in diversity and wants to buck the system a bit, but he insists that the art on his feet doesn’t define him — it simply complements the way he lives.
“My goals are to love my wife and my family well, work hard and work well, and love others well,” Peterson says. “If I can spark a conservation with somebody that most people wouldn’t, and it allows me to share a story of grace, then it’s a good day.”
