When I was growing up, only bikies, and a couple of hardcore kids who knew they were destined for a life of being tough, had tatts. I certainly wasn’t tough but had always wondered when I might get my first tattoo and what it would be. It took until I was in my 30s and visiting New York for me to finally take the plunge. I hadn’t thought of a design until I arrived in the city and decided while I was there that I would find a leaf in Central Park, draw my own version of it and permanently ink it on my person.
After a week of investigation, I decided on a collection of the leaves I had seen around and free-formed the leaf drawing myself. I positioned it on my forearm (the underside bit, what is that called BTW?) and was finally initiated into the world of body art. When I would show people, I would talk about the leaves of New York – yada, yada, yada.
Jacinta Parsons shows off her tattoos at an outside broadcast from Federation Square.Credit: Karl Quinn
That was, until one day, two years later, when I realised it wasn’t a leaf in Central Park that I had drawn and then permanently inked on me but that I had been pranked by IKEA. I rolled over in bed on that fateful morning and saw before me – in a stark moment of reality that proved I am merely a pawn in this capitalist machine – a piece of fabric that had been covering my bedside table for five or more years had a leaf that was the exact leaf on my arm. The Stockholm BLAD fabric leaf had been inked, in exacting and micro detail forever, into my skin.
I guess, after looking at it for years without seeing it any more, the leaf had somehow imprinted itself into my subconscious and I just played out the subliminal messages while naively believing I was somehow making my own decisions. It confirmed that I am merely a puppet for a big Swedish company that was in full control of my mind, and I was now a walking advertisement for the BLAD. Now, when I’m asked what inspired the tatt, I direct people to aisle 746 at their local IKEA super store.
But of course, as the adage goes, “a mile to your first and a minute to your second”, and soon there was a second tatt on the underbelly of my other forearm in the shape of a swan. Likely, the swan can be found as an Anko decal somewhere. But it’s the third tattoo that has the most meaning and hopefully has come from something real and not subliminal messaging from Elon Musk.
A couple of weeks ago, after celebrating 30 years of friendship, my friend, Ineke, and I decided that rather than go to a health retreat for ageing women, we’d get a tattoo to symbolise how important and significant those years of friendship have been for us. A bold move perhaps, as the question that arose from others around us was, well, what if the friendship falls in a heap at some stage in the future and you’ve got a tatt on you forever?
Jacinta Parsons and her friend Ineke show off their matching “quote” tattoos.
For me, the answer was simple: If I’d inked an IKEA leaf large and in full view of the world, I had not much issue with putting stuff on my body that might turn out to lose or change its meaning. We decided on a set of quotation marks on our wrists – mine was the open marks, hers were the closed. The tattoo symbolises the conversations that have happened between us over those years. When we put our wrists together, they are a full set. I suppose if the conversations stop between us for whatever reason, I could add a question mark. Or an ellipsis. Or simply a full stop.
But that’s the perennial question about tattoos – why you would commit to something permanent on your body that you might not like in later life, or that might come to remind you of something that has changed? And I suppose that’s what I love about them. There is a sense of putting a mark on your body because it’s meaningful now, not because you are sure it will always mean the same thing.
