Tom Henry is no stranger to tattoos. Henry, a senior English and textual studies major, got his first at 17 years old and now has more than 15 tattoos. Each is significant to him, either in its design or its representation of a period in his life.

Henry’s first tattoo shows three spades right next to one another. He laughs it off when he talks about it. Despite the weight and significance he gives to all of the other images on his body, he chalks this one up to being a dumb teenager.

But the image across his chest is a different story.

It reads ‘No pity for the weak’ over the top of a skull around an eye, representing the reaper. Henry said it is an emblem for a straight-edge lifestyle, one that disapproves of promiscuity and any drug and alcohol use.

‘Any heavy reliance on that stuff to feel like you have a normal life, it’s just a weak-minded reliance,’ Henry said. ‘You might get messed up, but when you sober up, your problem’s still there.’

Henry got the tattoo from Halo Tattoo and Bodypiercing’s Beau Brady, a local tattoo artist he met after moving to Syracuse from Kansas. His father dropped him off to go look for a parking spot, and he made a beeline for the nearest tattoo parlor.

Not very artistic himself, Henry told Brady to feel free to have some fun with the image.

Brady also inked an image of a koi fish swimming upstream on the back of Henry’s leg. Henry said he drew inspiration for this image from a Japanese tradition that suggests that a koi swimming upstream signifies the end of life. A koi swimming downstream signifies the beginning. Henry felt that this served as an adequate metaphor for the end of his past, one marked by addiction and anger.

‘When I first came here, it was a large break from a culture I had been very tightly tied into when I was back home,’ said Henry, showing off the fish. ‘I thought of it as kind of a moving into the next chapter of my life.’

-Compiled by Chelsea DeBaise, asst. copy editor, cedebais@syr.edu

Published on April 24, 2012 at 12:00 pm