We are a young family from Lithuania (Eastern Europe) and we have two kids - a boy and a girl. Our son is 4 year old and he was always fascinated with tattoos. We have a book about Russian prison tattoos and he prefers to browse it instead of hearing a bed time story.
We started getting inked when our boy was about 3 year old and ever since he was asking to get inked too. We were really hesitant about that because of the obvious reasons - we thought maybe he is too young to decide this for himself, we were also concerned about the aesthetic side - how will the tattoos turn out as his skin will grow.
We always believed that our kids are full members of the society that just have a different perspective and are being discriminated just because they don't see fighting for their rights in the society as a very important issue. That is why we decided to make a more thorough investigation on this problem rather than just discard it as "silly thought".
We found a psychotherapist that specializes in children self expression issues as our boy was becoming obsessed with this idea. He started drawing himself with tattoos and had a separate notebook with the exact designs that he wanted to get on his skin. The psychotherapist was working on a theses that discusses how children are discriminated in our society because of their age and how that causes later on in their life issues with self confidence and a hateful attitude towards other members of the society. After a long discussion our psychotherapist concluded that we should let our boy express himself. And although this wasn't easy emotionally, rationally we were totally convinced that self expression of a young individual is much more important than some old society dogmas.
We then went to a clinic that specializes in removing unwanted tattoos and they informed us that as our boy will grow his tattoos will become blurred and it will be really easy to remove them.
Finally we started looking for a tattoo artist and most of them did not get the seriousness of the situation. We did find a team of young, brave and talented tattoo artists who accepted the challenge.
The tattoo artist later admitted that she is a bit afraid as this is the first time she is working on such a young and soft skin but is really excited and wants to stay in touch with our kid for 10 years in order to see how his life and the tattoos are gonna turn out. She believes that this example might really change the perception in the society and even the laws that regulate self expression of young individuals in our society.
You can see the process in the photos. Our boy currently has fully inked chest, sleeves, neck and two tattoos on his face and is now thinking about getting a big piece on his back.
