Write about a tattoo you have and its significance, a tattoo you would like to get… or why you would never, ever get a tattoo.
Your move, writer.
Some ways in: write the tattoo as a scar that healed into something chosen — grief turned into ink, a name or date carried on skin because carrying it silently got too heavy. Or go the opposite direction entirely, comedy: the tattoo you got at nineteen that seemed profound at the time and is now a faded smudge you've built an entire family mythology around explaining. There's also the anti-tattoo essay — not fear, just a different philosophy, someone who marks time in photographs or scars or worn-out books instead, and wants to explain why permanence on skin never appealed. And don't overlook the daydream version: no ink yet, but a fully imagined design, chosen and placed with such care it already feels like part of you, waiting only for nerve.
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