My Dear Friends of Figma in You know the way I see it is um I don’t give a [__] about what anybody else thinks um and I’m not doing any of this for anybody else I’m doing it for me and if anyone’s lines are getting crossed that’s all none of their business I do this for me and I do this to make me.
Happy and this is what I want to look like and if this is what I want to look like it’s what I want to look like and you can just deal with it um it’s not about anything else just me hi I’m Caroline I’m 31 I’m from Brooklyn I grew up in Carroll Gardens like Cobble Hill in the 90s don’t really have much.
Else to say about growing up in New York other than it was like the best thing I could ever think of for a child there was just so much so many different things to see all the time there’s a lot going on a lot to look at one thing I remember really clearly growing up um is my mom had a lot of Keith Herring art in the house and we would see a lot.
Of it like outside on the street so that was cool to like grow up and he’s like iconic and that’s why I have a Keith hearing tattoo um because he reminds me of being a kid and it was just like a different pre-911 New York is a very different New York um and I miss it it just kind of seemed like there were different tensions but.
Not the constant like anxiety and I just feel like I’m clenched all the time here now I feel like the city is changing to fit an idealized version of it that just does not exist like it’s a version of New York that people made up and now that it doesn’t match like their delusion they’re just like.
Changing it up to fit some bolt that they made up I grew up with just my mom and we were um we were poor so we would have to find ways to entertain me in the city that didn’t involve like spending a lot of money or anything so sometimes we would like get a bunch of like really cheap acrylic paints and we.
Would just paint each other and like I don’t know we would just like do a bunch of weird [__] like that so there’s a ton of pictures of me as a kid like where I have I’m like holding up up my hands and I’ve like painted my own hands and my arms and my face and my chat like I’m just like covered head to toe and all these.
Weird little paint designs so I don’t think I there was ever a moment where I was like I’m gonna get tattooed it was more like I am regularly decorating myself anyway and it just kind of seemed like a natural progression from like painting my body with paint to just getting it done permanently.
My dad had tattoos he was the first person I remember having tattoos there’s pictures of me the day I was born him being the first person to hold me if you could see his little tattoos in them it was a star of David on one forearm like right in the middle and that was it and then on the other forearm it was an ankh and he was ambidextrous so he had like.
Done it to himself um but they were so old and that the onk still looked like an ankh because it’s kind of an unmistakable shape but the Star of David was so like blown out and old and like just up from years of like sun damage and all this other that he got up to that I thought it was a flower and I didn’t I didn’t know that it was a.
Star of David until he told me it was and I was like I must have been a teenager by the time he told me that my first tattoo was this one and it was the last night of Hanukkah in 2009 in Fort Lauderdale Florida and I had gone to visit my dad because he moved down there.
And he turns to me and he said and he was just like it was his idea he goes do you want to go get a tattoo and I was like yes I do I and we just went to this little like it was like off the side of the highway in like a weird little like like underpass part of the highway with like those gross neon lights out front look very very seedy.
And we went in there and I’m I’m like 16 and um I don’t know I guess you can just do whatever the [__] you want in Florida because I went and got a tattoo that night like a couple years prior to that my dad had a really bad stroke and he had to.
Forcibly retire um and he kind of like changed after that um sorry uh he just became very different and I was really struggling and I guess I’m just like trying to make sense of things I was just like well I.
Bet maybe I could like understand like things that I know for a fact are true so I was reading a lot of Carl Sagan that’s why I read Cosmos a whole bunch and it was like he made all the really complex unknowable things about the universe like makes sense in like a Layman’s sort of a way.
And it really helped me uh appreciate just how brief life is and how small we all are but how everything still matters in spite of that and it helped me like kind of just remember my place in a cosmic sense of things really light-hearted for a 16 year old my second tattoo was done by a man named.
Mad Dog in uh the back of a head shop on St Mark’s Place and it’s this little Spade I was like okay do the other hand and I got mad dog again little diamond right there which you can’t even tell what it is and then just from there I was like oh so I could get tattooed underage once I figured that out it was just like I would go after.
School and get tattoos and then for my I think on my actually on my 18th birthday I got my back done with um uh vaguely Native American Motif which uh in hindsight was super cringy of me as a white lady so I covered it up baby with a big old black circle because that’s like the easiest way to.
Obliterate that just cover it up and I really like the look of um blackened out it’s like extreme to a different degree and I like that obviously there’s a certain level of curiosity because you know it’s like I said a bit on the extreme side of things.
But I my chest was pretty heavily tattooed before I even blacked it out so I kind of tuned that [__] out now because I’m gonna have a Lee tattooed woman I live in New York I hear stupid [__] all the time so I’m kind of blocking it all out at this point um and I again don’t really care about.
Other people’s visceral reactions to me unless it’s good when I got my face tattooed it was actually to celebrate my 30th birthday not to get get to uh grim and depressing again but I honestly never really imagined myself as an adult because I never thought I’d make it here I wanted.
To do something to celebrate myself being alive making it here uh I did it a couple months prior I was going on uh Bender capital B and um I got my face completely smashed in at a show I like I’m pretty sure I broke something here because I had a black eye for like a month and.
Um shortly afterwards is when I was like I need to get my together and you know we got sober and all that so that was also like partly to celebrate that because this is literally exactly the spot where I got kicked in the [__] face or whatever happened um because I don’t really remember.
Uh but after that I got a tattoo on my face for my 31st birthday and it’s it’s a sword and it’s obviously larger than the other one because this year you know like EV when I turned 30 it was kind of like cool did it Landmark but every everyone after that that doesn’t end in like a five or a zero I’m like.
I’m already finding it hard to give uh but you know obviously it’s a milestone and I want to celebrate another year of I’m making it I guess and also it’s a sword because I love Slayer there’s definitely a few I just never would have gotten because I feel like some of them were like coping mechanisms.
In a weird way for being like just a lost young girl that didn’t really have much Direction and so I just coped by like getting a [__] tattoo you know like the sometimes when something hurts emotionally it doesn’t feel real until you feel like physically so I compensated sometimes by getting tattooed because you know it’s just like.
What can I do what can I do I feel so out of control like I can control this so get a tattoo sometimes I do regret the tattoos that I have underneath this one I do not regret this blast over I [__] love this thing I look I think it looks sick I love it I’m like an optical illusion.
Whatever I love it I probably could have done with having this done without having what was under it done first but I do like the idea of doing a blast over where you can see existing work underneath because people are always like oh tattoos that’s permanent you know that’s permanent and like yeah sure but I can still have like a new start.
With anything even something that’s so permanent like a massive tattoo on my chest I can still do something different with that um I do wish that I had thought a little bit more about what I got before I got this but.
Nothing I can do about it so oh well um and the other ones I would get rid of probably this thing because oh my God uh Red Hot Chili Peppers tattoo that I got in the two too many times what the hell was I thinking I was trying to hide it for a while and then if anyone did clock it I would tell them I was an EMT uh it’s uh thankfully.
Never had to do anything about that because man that would have been a nightmare
Caroline’s tattoo journey started differently than most—she was 16 and got the tattoo in a shady Floridian tattoo parlor as a present for the final day of Hanukkah. The tattoo—a drawing of the solar system she did herself—serves as a reminder of how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things, but also that everything we do matters. We spoke with Caroline about getting tattooed by a dude named Mad Dog, the beauty of blackouts and more.
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