By Sofia Na
February 12, 2025
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I have a hot dog on my shoulder, a girl wearing polka dot socks and a square for her head on my right arm, and an oddly shaped duck named Milton on my thigh.
When people look at my arms and legs, I am met with all kinds of judgment, and I typically get asked two questions: 1) “Are they real?” and 2) “What do they mean?”
The philosopher in me usually jumps at the chance to talk about the concept of reality and the meaning of anything. Sometimes, though, to evade negative commentary, I answer these questions with a tinge of sarcasm. To the first question, I might respond with an enthusiastic, “I sure hope so!” And to the second, I might say, “Well, I’m still figuring that out…”
To be honest, most of my tattoos are just designs I liked. Some hold sentimental value, while others truly are just random. I have the Taco Bell slogan (in its advertised font) tattooed on my arm: Live Mas. Do I believe this statement to be one of my core values? Eh, not really. Do I love Taco Bell and occasionally benefit from free Crunch wrap Supremes on account of my tattoo? Heck yeah.
In 2019, when I got my first tattoo, which was designed and given to me by a dear friend, I quickly realized that people were going to have questions about what it meant and why I got it. I’ve gotten 27 tattoos since then and I still haven’t crafted a polished response.
Tattooing exists in two planes for me. I’ve had a lot of them professionally done and I plan on getting more. I give tattoos as well. I started giving myself tattoos mostly because they’re expensive and I’m an “I can do that myself” kind of person. However, as I began peppering my body with silly little designs, people saw them and wanted some too! I was happy to share.
Over the past year, I have developed a small stick and poke tattooing business, that has often been referred to by my fellow seminarians as, “a ministry.” Stick and poking (or hand poking) is a non-electronic form of tattooing that involves dipping a needle into ink and individually poking dots until the desired design has been achieved. The process takes much longer than a regular tattoo; a small design that would take a tattoo gun three to five minutes takes nearly an hour with the stick and poke method.
Since my tattooing side-hustle has taken off, I’ve had the pleasure of sitting with 22 people, both friends and strangers, for anywhere from one to four hours. The tattooing process is this strange and wonderful vehicle through which I am able to poke holes into the skin of people’s bodies and the fabric of their lives. The more holes I create on the surface of the skin, the more the design comes together, and the more we talk, the more connected we feel to each other.
From both the giving and receiving end, there’s a lot of trust built into the experience. For prolonged periods of time, I have to sit close to someone else and slowly get to know them and their body. I have to hold and stretch the skin, and I’ve been entrusted with altering it in some way. In some cases, I’m giving a person their first tattoo. I have to inflict pain on another human being. I have to have confidence in myself and my abilities. I have to hope they like what it looks like in the end. It’s a lot. This kind of vulnerability isn’t immediate though.
I begin slowly by hand drawing the design on the skin with a pen and making sure the size and placement work. Then the conversation starts casually with questions like, “So, how long have you been tattooing?”; “Why did you choose this design?”; or “How was your day?” And then I get to work.
The word tattoo itself comes from the Polynesian word Tatau meaning “strike” ta and “mark” tau. And in every Polynesian culture tattooing is a practice used to signify status as well as mark special life events. My process doesn’t hold nearly the same kind of cultural or ritualistic significance, but I do think that there is something spiritual about tattoos themselves and the art of giving them. While I’m poking the conversation deepens from their initial formality and I find that they usually end up centering on God, or spiritually, or belief. This might be because I am a seminary student, but I like to think there’s more to it than that.
I am and have always been curious about the mechanism of belief. Part of the reason I’m studying at Princeton Theological Seminary is to figure out how and why I’ve come to believe in God. I love asking others what they believe and how they came to hold that belief. Alongside the steady in and out of the tattoo needle, conversations about belief that emerge have helped me to see how much commonality a lot of us hold even when what we believe in is unique to us.
Throughout this stick and poke journey it has been a privilege to see the ways people choose to tell their stories and express themselves through tattoos. I’ve tattooed crosses on Christians and question marks on Agnostics and Atheists.
Funnily enough, I don’t have a cross tattoo. But I do have a question mark. It was the first tattoo I ever got…coincidentally, also a stick and poke. And while I considered myself a Christian then, and still do now, my physical body shares in resemblance with two people who would confidently say they aren’t. With just a simple punctuation mark, I find myself strangely connected to people who don’t believe what I believe. With people who might not believe in anything.
When I think about my tattooing as a ministry, I find that it is less about evangelizing to people through God talk even though this is generally how the conversations go. Instead, I consider my tattooing a ministry of invitation. Tattoos themselves carry with them the power of invitation.
Though tattoos are notoriously rebellious, unprofessional, and slightly off putting, I have found that by existing in a body covered with tattoos like a cutlery set, a rocking horse, a blue Band-Aid, and the onomatopoeic kissing sound (Muah) written in shaky script, I am inadvertently inviting people to change their minds about what tattoos have to mean and how tattooed bodies could be perceived. Family members who were horrified when they saw Post Malone appear on the TV screen to sing at the Super Bowl embrace me with open arms when I come home, sometimes asking if I’ve added any new tattoos to my growing collection. And by giving tattoos to others, I invite people into a space that both conversationally and physically explores what curiosity, wonder, faith, doubt, and bravery can look like. Tattooing is a catalyst for dialogue that demands intimacy, vulnerability, self-interrogation, and a mutual sharing of respect and understanding. As the artist, I’m glad there’s a little bit of grace built into it as well.
We carry these body clothes around with us for as long as we live. And oftentimes, our questions, our creativity, and our grief are held internally. Tattooing allows us to express these things on the outside. And although they might be jarring to look at, and although some people think it’s ridiculous that I have a ready-to-go tic tac toe board on my thigh, by merely existing in a tattooed body, I can somehow, without uttering a single word, get people asking some of the most important questions of our human condition: What is real? What does anything mean?
Put differently, these questions echo the soft and persistent interrogations of my sometimes doubting, ever faithful heart. I find that, my sarcastic answers are probably the most honest: Is God real? I hope so. What does it all mean? I’m still figuring it out.
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Sofia Na
Sofia is a 24 year old MDiv student at Princeton Theological Seminary. She graduated from Eastern University with a BA in Philosophy after which she taught kindergarten and first grade English and History for two years at a private classical liberal arts school outside of Philadelphia, PA. She has many interests including writing children’s poetry, reading about ethics and ontology, and tattooing! She is a PTS student worker for both Polaris and the Special Collections department of The Wright Library. She is passionate about living into St. Francis of Assisi’s famous quote: “Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words.”
