Make Dreams Reality

Pretty much my whole life I wished I was an artist. My mom has been an art teacher for over 20 years, and her artistic ability skipped right over me. She can paint and draw anything, but I never thought she could impact someone’s life so much. Since I was about 15 years old I wanted to get a tattoo. Through about a year of convincing I finally was allowed to get one. My mom tells me one of her old students does tattoos, so we paid him a visit. We walk into “Our Lady of Ink” in Secaucus. Big Mike stands tall, in a shop with a very low ceiling. I’ve never seen anyone so happy to see my mom before. They hug and kiss and talk about their days at Hasbrouck Heights High School. He then shakes my hand and we start talking about what tattoo I’m going to get. I wanted to get a sun with clouds around and the saying “Make Dreams Reality.” We made the appointment for a month later and we were set. I was going to get my first tattoo.

When we were about to go back my mom decided to look through of attic of some of her things she left in storage. She found a painting that Mike made for her while she was pregnant with me. It was a painting of an angel coming down and delivering a baby lion to a family. At the time it probably meant nothing to him. He was just a kid in High School that was pretty good at art, my mom was cool to him, so he wanted to make her a painting about how she was having a baby. Little did he know 16 years later he would be tattooing that kid, me. My mom brought in the painting to the appointment and he almost cried looking at it. He says to my mom “You know what Brink, I never told you this but, you really changed my life.” There I am sitting there realizing that not only am I getting a tattoo from my mom’s favorite student ever. He probably wouldn’t even be here tattooing anyone if it wasn’t for my mom. We talked the whole time, they laughed about the good old days. And it really just made me realize how truly amazing my mom is. She inspired Mike to be an artist and she inspires me to be a better person every single day. Just the feelings that day gave me, I wish I could re live. Because I knew I was getting a tattoo that day that would last forever. I didn’t know that I would get an experience like that, that would also last forever.