By Ellie Daghlian

World’s best hangover cure.

People ask me what my tattoos mean a lot. I reckon they think it’s a good ice breaker. Easy topic of conversation. Except I’m a difficult human being who doesn’t really like opening up to people she’s just met, so I tend to just shut the question down. ‘Not much’, I’ll tell you. ‘I just like the way they look.’

It’s not completely untrue. My tattoos tend to come from the image first, then a meaning gets assigned later. They’ll start as some terrible doodle, which I’ll realise I quite like. Then turn into an actual drawing, which eventually gets handed over to a tattoo artists. None of them have stories the way some peoples’ ink can do, but there is a little bit more to it than you might otherwise think. Well, except for one of them.

There’s an orca and a sailing ship just below my left collar bone. A girl is leaning out the boat looking down. It’s hard to tell whether they’re friends or if she’s moments from being eaten. I think that which one you see says a lot about you. This bad boy was a hangover cure. Plain and simple. 

Something about being stabbed repeatedly with a needle for an hour really gets the adrenaline going, which in turn really handles hangovers. I woke up, knew what the morning was calling for and grabbed a pen. An hour later and I was handing over a picture drawn on the back of a receipt and then it was part of me forever. Sorry Dad.

Then there’s the first one I got. A lion on my ribs. Started as a drawing I drew and liked. Over time it’s come to represent courage. Cause lions. Never told anyone that before cause I think it sounds kinda moist. There you are.

Next there’s a dragon on my back. Sort of looks like a phoenix. It’s smashing a clock. Stylistically very Dr Woo inspired. Though with nowhere near the level of detail. The guy has these crazy tiny needles and only works on A listers. If I ever make it big, you know where I’m headed.

This one has at various points worked its way through variations of ‘f*ck time’/ ‘f*ck this’, depending on levels of teenage angst. As I stand today ever so slightly older and wiser, it’s more ‘f the rules’. Which still sounds angsty, but I guess works out as a promise to never conform.

Finally, there’s a naked woman stroking a cat on my arm. She came from a flash sheet a friend was doing, with money going to a domestic abuse charity. Her meaning comes from her placement. She was the first to really go in a visible spot. She’s a promise to myself to stop hiding who I am. To fight that urge to blend into whatever crowd I find myself in. With the exception of heavily inked crowds.