I got it down low on my hipbone so my parents wouldn’t see it (that lasted a whole 24 hours). I decided to get an Oscar Wilde quote for my first tattoo.
#Gay pride tattoo sleeve skin#
And what celebrates the wild, unabashed expression of identity, of individuality, like a tattoo that’s engraved onto our skin until the day we die? When we finally come out the other side, and we accept and embrace our gayness, we’re accepting and embracing our truest selves. It’s why so many of us queer kids grow up statistically depressed, vulnerable to the shackles of addiction and sadness. When we oppress something as innately human as our sexuality, it’s a direct attack against ourselves. Cut off our hair, rip off our clothes and strip away the flesh our sexuality is what remains, grotesquely gleaming in all its raw glory. Sexuality exists at the core of our identity. Related: Alternative Isn’t Dead: Why Queer Women Unite Over Their Love of Tattoos Photo by istock Tattoos were about affirming your identity. I might have been a clueless sixteen-year old, but I felt an intrinsic understanding of the desire to be tattooed.
Didn’t matter if they were high-fluting power-babes with sprawling mansions in the mountains or day-tripping 21-year-olds with torn-up backpacks they were all adorned in ink. Almost every lesbian I saw that summer had tattoos.
I spent the rest of trip staring at lesbians and the creative tattoos that peppered across their lesbian bodies. In that moment I vowed to get a tattoo as soon as I was home, to memorialize my newfound sense of self. I felt something I had never felt before in my life. “Oh, definitely women, honey.” She answered staring into my eager, gay eyeballs. “Am I going to date women, or men, when I’m older?” I asked her, praying to the lesbian goddesses that she said women. She was an older dyke, with a shaved head and lip-ring. I went saw on a fortune teller on that trip. And I was too polished and too fashion-crazed for the stoner-faux-hippy-chicks, the non-deodorant wearing lady teen potheads, who wore sarongs to school in the depths of the New England winter.īut in the lesbian underworld of Provincetown, I belonged. I wasn’t basic or bitchy enough for the “popular” girls who collected hideous pink Juicy Couture tracksuits for sport and would kill a bitch for a brand-new silver Tiffany ID bracelet.
I wasn’t weird enough for the “four building freaks” (the theatre kids that spent their Friday nights singing the RENT soundtrack). I had never felt like I fit in at my perfectly manicured (snooze) Westport, Connecticut high school. There were femme lesbians, butch lesbians, goth lesbians, lesbians with suntans and honey-blonde-hair and lesbians that didn’t fit into any kind of lesbian category.
#Gay pride tattoo sleeve full#
Lesbians with pockets full of money walking around town with fluffy, perfectly-groomed dogs. There were lesbians with shaved heads and tattoos. I unflinchingly stared at them as they made-out over heaping plates of the world-famous Massachusetts lobstah in cozy, chic restaurants. Lesbians were everywhere! They clutched hands while walking down the streets of the quaint seaside village. Related: Seven Minutes in Heaven with Queer Tattooist Virginia Elwood Photo by Wiki Commons My lackluster heart, for the first time ever, soared into the pale blue P-Town sky. Have you ever been to Provincetown? It’s a lesbian mecca. This was confirmed labor day weekend when I went to Provincetown with my best friend Suzie, for a little pre-school-year vacation on The Cape. I knew, the moment my chapped, teen lips touched hers, that I was gay. We hooked up in the summer and when the school year started up in the fall, she left for boarding school in Switzerland (she was a bougie euro babe, I was a tri-state baby punk) and we never saw each other again. It was soul-scorching, powerful, all-consuming and forever changed the course of my life. It was classic, short-lived, first time, teenage lesbian love. Actually calling it a “hook up” undermines the epic experience! I fell in love with this girl.
I got my first tattoo at age 16, right after I hooked up with a girl for the first time.