“She Wanted a Meaningful Tattoo, But What She Got Was a Hilarious Meme Mishap!”
“Of course there was the usual misogyny that comes along with mentioning the ‘she’ or ‘her’. I should have used neutral pronouns,” said the artist. “There were comments that completely ignored the text, and were only talking about, and exaggerating the fact that this woman has made a poor decision. I don’t even have to explain why gender is not relevant at all here.” However, she said she wasn’t too surprised “because I, myself, am a woman.”
“What did surprise me, though, is how many people assumed I was a man!” she added. “It reminded me that even though the tattoo industry has grown a lot in inclusivity, some people still see it as a male-dominated field.”
The artist says the experience has left her scarred
Image credits: Barbara Zandoval (not the actual photo)
We asked how the experience has affected her personally. “I get war flashbacks every time someone hits me up with a tattoo request in a foreign language,” she said. “My friends who are tattoo artists as well found this event hilarious and had a good laugh about it, but I’ve always been more sensitive. So this marked me.”
The tattoo artist says she wishes she could have avoided the entire situation, but added that she’s learned some valuable lessons from the whole experience. “When you start to tattoo every day, you stop having that anxiety you used to get when you started. The crippling worrying of messing up someone’s body forever which made you extra extra careful with every single aspect. You start to miss out on things, like in this case double-checking a translation the client came in with,” she explained. “I think most of us start having that auto-pilot feeling after a while at our job. This woke me up and made me come back to the alertness I had in the beginning.”
