There’s something to be said about loving an idea so much that you feel the need to condemn it to permanence. We live in an age that sometimes confuses consumerism with love which means that we need to digest or embody something for our claim over it to feel valid.  

There’s this strange trend these days of creating competition around hobbies or interests, people have a habit of commodifying ideas or pieces in media in order to justify their passion. We can see the same theme in tattoos where people feel the need to commodify pop culture by etching it permanently on their flesh.  

That isn’t to say that everyone who ever got a Harry Potter tattoo in 2016 is a competitor in some unspoken contest (for which there really is no winner) but it’s interesting to examine the urge to mark yourself with an obvious symbol of allegiance towards something so widely loved. In the past tattoos have been primarily associated with alternative subculture. Now, with body art becoming more mainstream we have established a sort of social ritual or culture around customising our own bodies.  

It’s fascinating from an anthropological standpoint, when we consider the theory that ‘culture’ is a system of symbols used to convey ideas, how this age of expression will be looked upon in the future where these are the stories we choose to have on our bodies. Sometimes it’s not that deep but sometimes it really is. Personally, I think that it’s a thing of beauty, that we can love another person’s art or creative spirit so much that some of us decide to have it immortalised as a part of ourselves.