My personal approach to fandom tattoos (at least 4 of my 6 tattoos) is to make them fandom related, instead of fandom based; to take an idea from the fandom, something that means something to me whether it’s in relation to the show/book/movie or not, if that makes sense.
For example, my Twin Peaks tattoo (tw blood). For starters, it’s not blatantly obvious. Anyone who knows the show would recognise it, but, if not, it’s just a cool looking couple of triangles. As much as I love Kyle’s face, I wouldn’t get it tattooed on me, quite frankly. (That being said, I think the Twin Peaks fandom has some of the most artistic and original tattoos I’ve ever seen, I love looking them up, they’re absolutely gorgeous.)
To me this tattoo is not just a way of saying “I love this tv show”, because, as you say, what if they fuck up now and I end up hating it? I mean, it’s unlikely, and even if that happened I would just ignore s3 and think of the original seasons as a separate entity I would still enjoy (don’t we do it already with certain parts of the second season? We have experience in that).
To me this particular tattoo is about the wonder I felt when I first watched the show. I will never forget starting the first episode, thinking well there we go, been hearing about this show for 25 years, it’s about time I watched it, and by the end of it having to STOP. Just stop, sit there in silence, and think about what I had just watched. And how this feeling kept growing the more episodes I watched.
I studied literature in grad school (don’t ask me what for because I KNOW IT’S USELESS. I just really love it and genuinely wanted to do it). Storytelling is what I love the most in the world. Which, unlikely, means that I am sort of hard to please. It’s not easy for me to find something, be it books or movies/shows, that truly amaze me and move me with both its content and its form. Something I find truly special: something that I can appreciate on many different levels; something that inspires me, and makes me think and feel; something that keeps on giving no matter how many times I revisit it. So I wanted a tattoo to celebrate that feeling, and to remind me I can find it in the most unexpected places, even when it seems like I haven’t found anything inspiring in ages and damn maybe nothing will make me feel again.
I said I love storytelling; that doesn’t mean I’m any good at explaining myself, ok? I TRIED.
So, even if I ended up hating the show, or even Lynch and Frost personally, or the actors, or what have you, the tattoo would still mean a lot to me. I don’t know about other people with fandom tattoos, but that’s my experience with it.
(Also, all my tattoos are placed in parts of my body I don’t see all the time, so I don’t get tired of them. And I think hard and for a LONG time, sometimes YEARS, before I get them. This one came relatively quickly to me because I knew I wanted something simple, and Margaret gives me a ton of feelings that I won’t get into now, so it just made sense to me to get that.)
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