I have more than twenty-five tattoos, which sounds impressive until you remember that in the late ’80s and early ’90s, tattoos weren’t considered “self-expression.” They were considered evidence.
There were no minimalist wrist constellations. No tasteful infinity symbols. No matching mother-daughter hummingbirds. Back then, if you had a tattoo, people assumed you were either in a band, recently released from somewhere, or about to deeply disappoint your guidance counselor.
I got my first one thirty-seven years ago. I walked into a tattoo shop I had never researched because Google didn’t exist... and apparently neither did fear, planning, or the fully developed frontal lobe. I told no one.
Four hours later, I came home unable to lift my arm. It felt as if a swarm of bees had unionized and was working overtime on my bicep. I remember thinking, This is terrible. I love it.
I chose my Irish family coat of arms because, at eighteen, nothing felt more important than my last name. My bloodline. My history. My story.
At eighteen, you think identity is something you carve into the world. At fifty-five, you realize identity is mostly what the world carves into you.
I came home smelling like rubbing alcohol and rebellion, with a bandage the size of a beach towel wrapped around my arm. My parents reacted in surround sound. One was stunned into silence. The other looked as if I had just announced I was leaving college to tour with Mötley Crüe.
It was not exactly the Braveheart moment I had imagined.
Still, I knew something had begun. My skin would become a canvas. A scrapbook. A map of who I was becoming... and, occasionally, who I was trying very hard to convince everyone I already was.
But here is the part I don’t love admitting: I hid my tattoos for almost thirty years.
I wore long sleeves in August, buttoned cuffs at barbecues, and cardigans in weather that required hydration, medical supervision, and prayer. Not because I was ashamed of the ink. Because I was afraid of the judgment.
I thought I needed to look like Mr. Rogers in public: respectable, pressed, cardigan-level wholesome. I believed tattoos made me look like trouble.
Or worse.
Human.
So I sweated for years. I tried to look safe. I tried to look polished. I tried to look like a man who had everything together... even when things were quietly coming apart.
That is the part that makes me sad now. Not the tattoos. The summers.
All those years I spent physically uncomfortable so other people could remain emotionally comfortable. All those pieces of myself hidden beneath cotton because I was terrified someone might see me and decide I was less than the person I was pretending to be.
Of course, tattoos have changed since then. Now grandmothers have butterflies. Grandfathers have Scripture. Soccer moms have full sleeves and ask whether the coffee shop has oat milk. Somewhere along the way, rebellion became décor.
And I’ve finally realized something... the ink was never the scandal.
The hiding was.
These days, I don’t cover my tattoos. Not at the beach. Not on walks. Not while standing in line for coffee like the dangerous, fully evolved rebel I have become.
When I look at my arms now, I don’t just see artwork. I see my children. All of my children. Proudly. I see Erin. I see the reminders I needed when I was unraveling. I see prayers I didn’t know how to say out loud. I see promises I made after my life cracked open. I see the faith I grabbed with both hands when I had nothing polished left to offer God.
My arms, chest, and back tell pieces of the truth about me. But not all of it.
Because the deepest marks aren’t made with needles.
Every one of us is tattooed. Some of us just don’t have visible ink.
We are marked by love and loss. By betrayals and second chances. By the words spoken over us as children... and the words we waited our whole lives to hear. We are marked by the people who stayed, the people who left, the silence that followed our worst decisions, and the grace that found us there anyway.
Some people wear their stories on their skin. Some carry them into therapy. Some carry them in their posture. Some carry them in the way they apologize for taking up space. Some carry them in the way their whole body flinches when someone raises a voice.
But every one of us is marked.
The question has never been, Do you have a story?
You do.
The question is, Are you still hiding it beneath long sleeves?
I wish someone had told me this when I was eighteen... the parts of yourself you are sweating to conceal may be the very parts that help someone else breathe.
Your scars are not liabilities. They are lighthouses.
Your failures are not disqualifications. They are directions home.
The world does not need the polished version of you... the one buttoned up, covered over, and slowly suffocating beneath all that fabric. It needs the real one. The marked one. The one who survived the very story he was certain would ruin him.
I spent almost thirty years hiding the ink because I was afraid people might see who I really was. Then life handed me wounds no sleeve could cover.
That is when I finally learned...
God was never waiting for the polished man to come home.
He had been sitting beside the wounded one all along.
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