Tattoos mark major life events for students

There are a lot of things that define a person growing up – dating, driving, graduation, college, and for some, tattoos.

Texas Tech students share the stories of their most meaningful tattoos, and the impact it has had on their life.

Although Chase Dowling, a senior accounting and finance major from Houston, has multiple tattoos, one stands out to him above the others.

In February 2017, Dowling decided on a tattoo to honor his grandfather, who passed away from lung cancer in 2012.

When thinking of a way to best symbolize his grandfather’s life in a tattoo, Dowling sat down with a close friend to help design it. They decided on an electrocardiograph to represent his life, a small cancer ribbon to explain what happened, leading into a flat line to show his death, and a small arrow added at the end to symbolize the continuance of his legacy.

Compared to his other tattoos, Dowling said his family was more accepting of the tribute because it had so much meaning behind it.

“I think [the tattoo] is kind of timeless,” Dowling said. “That one will never change because the meaning is so set in stone.”

Summer Beckworth, a senior biology major from North Richland Hills, said she waited until after high school graduation to get a tattoo and tried to think of something meaningful for her first one.

While taking astronomy in high school, she learned about the pulsar map. A message was sent out to interstellar space on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Beckworth said if aliens ever found the spaceship, it would give them a map of our solar system.

In her class, Beckworth said her teacher was extremely passionate about the Voyager spacecraft, and he viewed the pulsar map abstractly. He explained to the class that the center of the universe is where each person is relatively located.

When designing her tattoo, Beckworth said she kept in mind the teacher’s expression and decided to make the pulsar map more related to her life.

“I put Texas in the middle of the map because it is my home, and put a cross in Texas because Jesus is the center of my universe,” she said.

After getting the map on her back, she updated the tattoo in 2016 to include the solar system of the binary map.

“I’ve gotten more since then, but the first one still has a lot of meaning to me, and I really like it,” Beckworth said. “I just wish I could see it more, since it’s on my back.”

Hope Lenamon, a senior journalism major from McGregor, said her tattoo inspiration came from studying abroad in 2017 to New Zealand through the College of Media & Communication.

“On that trip, I met some of my best friends to this day and some of my favorite professors,” she said. “Overall, it was just one of the best experiences of my life.”

Lenamon said they learned the national bird of New Zealand, the Kiwi bird, and when she saw it at a botanical garden, she thought it was the cutest and needed a way to always remember it somehow.

After returning from her trip, she planned out a tattoo of the Kiwi. Lenamon said she was too scared to get it for the longest time, and in May 2018 decided to schedule an appointment with a tattoo shop in Lubbock.

“I joke that my body is my passport now,” Lenamon said. “Whenever I travel somewhere new, I want to get a tattoo to remember that time instead of a silly souvenir.”

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