I recently got a “stick and poke” tattoo from my roommate, Greg Van Dyke, and I am super happy with the way it turned out. The tattoo he gave me is the triforce symbol from The Legend of Zelda on my right shoulder, making it my second tattoo, along with the chi-rho on my left bicep I got last year from Mainline Ink.
I’ve always thought the triforce was a cool looking symbol since I was a kindergartner playing Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64 at home and I decided over the course of a few days that I wanted Greg to tattoo it on me. I really fought with myself over this decision because, admittedly, it’s pretty geeky and I had convinced myself that to tattoo something on your body, you should think about it for a super long time, and that whatever you do tattoo on your body should have some amazing significance to you.
The chi-rho was easy to decide on: it is a symbol for the hall I’ve been on my whole time at Covenant, where my closest friends and great memories are; but more importantly and foremost, it is a symbol for Christ and a visible and physical reminder that I belong to Him—body and soul.
Because the chi-rho means so much to me for these reasons, I felt like I couldn’t just put the triforce on me because it doesn’t hold nearly that amount of significance. Granted, I have a lot of fun memories playing Legend of Zelda with my older brother, Andrew, and it really does remind me of my childhood; but it just did not have the significance to me of the chi-rho.
Well, obviously I decided to get it still, and a lot of it had to do with Will Friesen. He had just gotten a stick and poke chi-rho from Greg the night before (don’t worry, we used different needles) and he was encouraging me to go for it. He said that he thought people take tattoos a little too seriously and worry too much about what other people will think about them (it’s been a while now so I may not be recreating his argument perfectly). The more I thought about it the more I agreed. If I like the design and want it, why not go for it? There is no unwritten law about what you can and cannot tattoo on yourself (within reason of course, you shouldn’t get a tattoo that would offend others, but that’s a different topic) so this internal conflict within me was pretty unnecessary.
In the end, I got the triforce tattoo. I like it, and I think it looks cool. At the end of the day I think that’s all that matters.