What got you interested in tattoos?

It was just a cool way to express myself at the beginning, because it’s art, it’s cool, it’s very personal, because you design it, and it’s on you forever. So the whole genre of tattooing was cool to me.

So the bigger one was my first.

I was so nervous, all I did was the outline, no shading or anything, just the basic outline.

It took the guy 10 minutes. And he was like, “that’s it?” I’m like, that’s it, thanks.

That was my first one. And then this one, once I got married, so it’s a Celtic Trinity knot.

So once I got married, I added the two for the kids and then shaded them all. So now this means to me unconditional love for my family. But it started out as just that first big one.

This is the second one.

I should find a picture of the original, ’cause it’s a cover up now, so you can see inside the fish what it used to be. Originally, it was a douchey, tribal arm band, which was just a hot, cool thing to do when I was just getting out of high school. So it started out as that tribal armband. Unintentional, but after the tattoo is done, my girlfriend at the time found her initials in the tattoo.

She thought that was cute. So then when I got married, we had to get rid of them. So, the fish and everything but the top was just to cover up an old one.

Next would have been Noah for my son. Right after he was born.

I changed my mind with Charlie. So Charlie, I’ve always told, hey, whenever you’re ready for your daddy tattoo, why don’t you – because she’s in good art and drawing – why don’t you draw it and then whatever you want, I’ll get it. She hasn’t done it yet, so we’ll see when it comes around, but that one’s up to her.

The Mariner one. I did that one just because I love the Mariners, and then I added the Space Needle on top of the old trident, which I thought was sweet.

I forgot the wedding ring. Eva I decided to do tattooed wedding rings.

It did not get me out of diamonds, which is bullshit. So we did just a tattoo. She did the Roman numerals of our wedding date. I need to get mine touched up again because finger tats are hard. But it’s just an old English “E” with some shading around it.

This is my favorite one. I did HVAC install nine or ten years before I moved over to the sales side of things.

A day of gas piping with that wrench in a crawl space is the hardest thing you could do in a day. So my thought with that one was “remember the hard work that you put in?” Because now you could replace that with a pen or a keyboard, but it wasn’t always like that. That was just a reminder of the hard work you did to get where you’re at and keep it up.

The other fun thing about tattoos is the conversation, in your 20s, this is what you thought about life in the world, and then you get to 30. Those answers have changed 100%. And then you think you got that figured out.

And then you get to 40 and you’re like, those answers have completely changed all over again. So a lot of times tattoos will also change with how your worldview changes or how whatever changes. So that’s always a big part of the tattoo conversation,  I got that when I thought this, or I got that when I was into this, or I got that when I was with this person.

And a lot of times those things totally change.

But on the general, I think they’re great. I think they’re cool. I think they’re a conversation starter.

It’s a time of your life that something was meaningful enough to enshrine it in some sort of art and permanently put it on your body. So they’re kind of a big deal.