I read the ABA Journal’s eReport (that’s a Report that goes out eLectronically) every Friday, and was a little surprised to see this under "Answers of the Week": "Last week we asked what inspired you to get tattooed."
That was also a little puzzling to me because I assumed that, like me, all attorneys had Title 28 of the U.S. Code tattooed onto them for easy reference, but upon review of the article it appears not.
Being attorneys, many of the respondents seem to have written with great sincerity, erudition, and ponderosity in order to demonstrate fully the elaboration of their thought processes with regard to their tats. So the article contains the following sentences, among others:
"Maybe the yin/yang does, in some way, symbolize the scales of justice, but for me, it is more than that." Not a sentence you want to hear come out of the person sitting next to you on a cross-country flight.
"A dear friend of mine had given me a small plaque when I graduated from law school that simply said, ‘to thine own self be true.’ . . . I had this placed on my lower back [in Kanji characters] to remind me always to remain faithful to myself and my values." Here’s a tip: your own lower back is not the best place to write something as a reminder. At least not as a reminder to yourself.
"My fifth tattoo [is] on the back of my neck. It is centered and therefore does not need to be matched by anything to maintain my symmetry."
And then this:
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One of my textual tattoos is a Heraclitus fragment in Greek that reads, roughly translated, "The people should fight for the laws as they would fight for the city walls."
Name withheld by request |
The moral of that story is, don’t go around showing people your Heraclitus fragment, and if you do, for God’s sake don’t give your name.
Happily, the guy who responded from Kansas City, MO, was a little more down-to-earth: "I have come to understand that the design that looked so appealing that day must surely be the Native American symbol for ‘stupid 18-year-old.’"
Link: ABAnet.org