A woman who got a tattoo to mark the sad passing of a beloved aunt has discovered something unexpected about her new inking.
The decision to get a tattoo is often an emotionally driven one. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found 69 percent of tattooed adults cited a desire to honor or remember someone or something as either a major or minor reason for their inking.
A desire to honor someone was certainly a key reason for Ghida, from Edinburgh, Scotland, though she took inspiration from the video game Life Is Strange for the design of her latest tattoo. “It’s one of my favorite games ever and means a lot to me,” she told Newsweek. “I’ve been planning it for years and I wanted to pick the right artist for it.”
Ghida wanted to get a spiral adorned with an ‘X’, three stars and a butterfly. Within the spiral would be the words “these actions will have consequences” a reference to a famous line of dialogue in Life Is Strange.
“The tattoo means the passing of time is inevitable and we can’t go back to change our mistakes, we can only move forward and make sure we don’t repeat them,” Ghida said.
Part of what resonates with Ghida when she plays Life Is Strange is the emphasis it places on the fact “bad things are inevitable” whether in the game or in life. That’s something Ghida sadly knows only too well.
“I lost my aunt to cancer almost two years ago,” Ghida said. “Since then, I have continuously had the thought of ‘what if I was there?’, and ‘I wish I spent her last moments beside her.’ I couldn’t have since I moved away from home at that time.”
Her aunt’s death hit Ghida very hard, and her memories of her illness are “overlapped” with her experience of playing the game. “She was a very influential person in my life and Life Is Strange is a game I started playing around the time when she first got diagnosed with cancer,” Ghida said. “It was a game that made me cope with my aunt’s death and with everything going on at that time.”
Ghida was on vacation in England when she finally found the right tattoo artist to turn her design into a reality. She was delighted with the results at first. But, a few days later, she took a closer look. “I spotted the error a week after coming back,” Ghida said.
Unbeknownst to her at the time, the tattoo artist had written “”these actions will have conseqences,” missing a crucial “u” off “consequences” in the process. “I messaged the artist, and he was also shocked he didn’t realize the mistake,” Ghida said. “I did the same thing, which is why I didn’t realize until I was analyzing it closely.”
Despite the error, Ghida holds no ill will toward the tattooist. “I do not blame the artist,” she said. “I don’t feel like he did it on purpose and I wasn’t paying attention to the stencil, which I should’ve!”
She is also keen to stress that they were not alone in failing to spot the mistake. “All my friends didn’t even realize and, when I told them, they were all shocked and were like ‘we didn’t realize at all,'” Ghida said.
In the immediate aftermath of the discovery, Ghida felt down. So she turned to social media for help. “I was kind of sad about it, but then I was like, ‘OK, let me post this on Reddit to see what other people think,'” she said.
The post, shared under the handle u/femmesaturnx, went viral, earning over 22,000 upvotes. Some of the responses caught Ghida off-guard. “A lot of people thought it was purposeful and that the error was ironic,” she said. “I was really insecure about it but Reddit made me reassured that I should just own it.
Though Ghida considers the whole experience to be a “learning lesson” that she too now views the tattoo as having a “triple meaning.” She said: “The additional meaning is that mistakes are inevitable and it’s OK to make them!! They don’t define you, and it’s important to learn from them.”
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