Yale Ink

When I walk around Yale, I don’t see many tattoos. Yes, there is sometimes the odd line tattoo on a forearm, but generally, Yale folks roam the earth uninked. Given the pre-professional bent that colors any Ivy League campus, this wealth of virgin skin is somewhat unsurprising. And yet, a girl I met last year — whose conventional style, demeanor, and desire to pursue consulting seemed to declare, “I would never get a tattoo” — caught me by surprise as she slowly rolled up her shirt and showed me not one but two: a snowflake and a detailed phoenix.

And then tattoos began popping up, occasionally but consistently. On his 18th birthday, the boy across the hall crushing on my roommate went and got a string of Chinese symbols down his spine to celebrate his family. My good friend, with a single cuff of her pant leg, revealed the smiley face on her ankle that I’d been ignorant of for the year I’d known her. The Timothée Chalamet wannabe (bless his outcasted British soul) had small “x” symbols peeking out from his tricep. My sophomore-year suitemate came back from the summer with a fresh troop of tiny numbers and symbols scattered across his body. And of course, every sort of person in the art school seems to have some mottled stick-and-poke slapped onto a calf or a wrist.

I’m certainly no different. At the ripe age of 20, I marched my previously unmarked self down to a studio in Brooklyn and got an approximation of a green squished abstracted eye permanently etched into my back. I felt triumphant, rebellious. (My fairly anti-tattoo parents still have no idea.) I had changed my body in this small, secret way, and I owned it completely.

And college really is the perfect time for tattoos. For perhaps the first time, you are simultaneously owner of your time, actions, and body. Tonight, you could meet your lifelong friend in a suite across campus, or you could commit to being English major, or you could secure the internship that takes you on a one-way path to Wall Street. Choices like these are crazy because they are lasting. In the face of solidifying the rest of your life, and the newfound freedom of matriculation, putting ink onto your body seems not only to be a permanent avenue of self-expression, but also a small manifestation of the choices we make during our college years that will be with us for the rest of our lives. So if you’re on the fence, definitely get that tattoo. And make it a good one.

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