Tattoo Proposal

If you’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it, I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A few weeks ago we talked on the show about text tattoos, the fact that more people are getting tattoos that have words and letters on them.

And we asked people for their stories about that, and we got some really thoughtful responses.

A lot of the text tattoos that people are getting tell a kind of story.

You know, people get them when they’re at a turning point in their life, maybe a breakup or a move across the country.

And another thing that I found interesting from these emails was the fact that for a lot of people, as these text tattoos accumulate, they start to tell a kind of story in different languages.

We heard from Patience Etaya, who was originally from Ghana, but she moved here as a small child.

And one of her tattoos is her traditional Ghanaian name, which is Akosua.

And she said she got that because it’s a beautiful name, but it doesn’t show up in any of my official documents.

And then she has her name spelled out in Arabic letters.

And the reason that she has Arabic letters for her name is because her husband is from Morocco.

And she said, I didn’t want to put his name on my body, so I chose something representative of both of us coming together.

And then she has lyrics from a song that really spoke to her in Spanish.

And she also has her father’s initials with his birthday intertwined because he passed away in a car accident.

And she said, this is my way of always keeping him with me.

And so they were really personal stories, you know, really touching.

And we also heard firsthand from a tattoo artist.

His name is Joseph Wittenberg, and he’s out here in Temecula near San Diego.

And he said that text tattoos are now about 25% of his business.

Most of them are names and song lyrics.

And Joseph himself has a text tattoo.

He put one on his thigh.

He has a tattoo just above his knee that says, Rachel, will you marry me?

And what he did was he was wearing shorts.

He went down on one knee and he pulled up his shorts so she could see the marriage, the proposal.

Yeah.

And it’s still there.

Yeah.

Did he put a yes in afterward?

Yes.

Or something to that effect.

I can’t remember what it is, but he actually got news coverage.

You can actually go on YouTube and see him pulling his shorts up to show her the tattoo.

Proposal on his leg.

Yeah.

Isn’t that sweet?

Yeah.

I guess.

That’s serious, right?

Serious?

I don’t know about sweet.

Well, you know, I think that’s…

It’s a commitment.

I was going to say it’s a commitment because he didn’t just say, will you marry me?

He said, Rachel, will you marry me?

Anyway, I love how personal all these stories are.

And we love hearing your personal stories about language.

You can send them to words@waywordradio.org or call us with them, 877-929-9673.