Tattoo… You?

No. I do not have a tattoo. There are a lot of reasons, and they are not vague ones. My body was shaped by work, by gravity, by time, and by God. It carries scars that I did not choose. It carries strength I had to earn. That is enough writing on the skin for me.

I grew up in a world where you fixed things. You did not decorate them. If something left a mark, it meant you had survived something real. A wrench slipped and sliced the knuckle. A cable tore across the palm. The stories were etched by accident and paid for with effort. That felt honest.

Ink never did.

Yet I am a father. And the moment you are a father, the world will test every rule you thought was carved in stone. My son has three tattoos already. Beautiful to him. Alarming to me. He calls them expressions of his identity. He says they will remind him of who he is. I argue the opposite. Identity is proven in what you do, not what you display. He tells me I am stuck in the past. I tell him he is writing checks with his skin his future self must cash.

We laugh. We argue. We stand our ground. We keep loving each other.

If I were ever to have a tattoo, and I am not saying I will, it would not be trendy. It would not be art for art’s sake. It would have to bear the weight of a life. Something that will mean as much in the final chapter as it did in the first. A symbol of soil and sky from Cameroon and Canada and everywhere in between. A chameleon maybe, not because everyone thinks they are cool, but because adapting kept me alive. Or maybe a single scripture reference that saved me more than once.

But that would mean believing my skin needs a reminder my soul should already carry. And I am not ready to admit that.

Here is the deeper truth. The tattoos on my son are not a rejection of me. They are a declaration that he is becoming a man who chooses. A man who writes his story with intention instead of waiting for life to scribble on him. That takes courage. Even if I disagree with the canvas.

So no, I remain unmarked. At least in the ink sense. But life has tattooed me in other ways. Through every place I learned to stand. Through every person I refused to give up on. Through the hard-earned resilience that does not need to be visible on the outside to be undeniably real.

If someday my children look at me and see conviction, integrity, and a love that outlasted fear, that will be enough. My skin does not need to say a word. My life already does.

I write

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