Everyone knows the first-year college essentials: a fan, quality hangers, maybe even a handle of vodka bought by your mom. But as the stigma around tattoos is diminishing more and more, some students are also coming to campus with fresh body ink.
If you ask Seth Rose ’26 if you should get a tattoo, he will tell you to “send it.”
Rose received his first ink—a quotation on his left forearm and an intricate compass rose—while serving in the United States Marine Corps in Japan before college and has a vision for more tattoos. “The plan is to turn it into a map that’s going to be a sleeve,” he said, explaining that he was limited by the Marines’ regulations on tattoos. “This is 1 millimeter within the regulations,” he said, gesturing to his tattoo. “I have 1 millimeter to spare.”
Rose has a light-hearted view of tattoos. “Pretty much, it’s just for kicks,” he said.
Maddy McKenzie ’26 tattoo of a butterfly on her bicep is more meaningful. “I wanted it for a while, and then one day was like, ‘man, I’m gonna go get it,’” she said of her visit to the tattoo parlor after graduating high school. “The butterfly is meaningful because my great grandmother passed away, and any time we see a butterfly we like to say it’s her,” she said. “She always thought that angels were butterflies.”
McKenzie also has the roman numeral of her lucky number, eight, on the inside of her left wrist. Her future tattoo aspirations include a medusa on her right shoulder, a sun and moon on each shoulder, and “the way the solar system looked on my sister’s birthday,” she added. “I feel like I’m one of those doodle bears where you just put shit on for fun.”
Butterflies seem to be a theme. On her 18th birthday, Melanie Sanchez ’26 got three flying up her right arm. “My grandma likes to call my mom, my sister, and I the three butterflies because we all flew away from home,” she explained. “My mom went from Bolivia to the U.S., my sister went from Bolivia to the U.S., and I left Florida to come here.”
In keeping with her family’s tradition of honoring their relationships, Sanchez also has “a gladiola and a sunflower for my great grandma and my great aunt,” a small collection including the word “love,” a small heart, and her cat, plus an image of Snoopy, her favorite cartoon as a child.
“I feel like there are some I know I am going to keep forever, and there are some I know I will eventually get something else to replace it with,” Sanchez said. “For me, I think of my tattoos as memories, or moments I have had in the past, not necessarily something I always want to keep on my body permanently.” She believes in the “just go for it” approach to body art.
Kevin Fischetto ’26 has a similar outlook. At 18, he got the word ‘grit’ tattooed across his stomach after an ice climbing accident in Montana. “I fell like 30 feet. I messed up my knees, my ankle, and ended up having to leave my gear behind. On the way back we got caught in a blizzard and we got lost. We ended up being out there for like 23 hours total, so it was a very difficult moment, and we definitely needed to persevere through it. I have learned a lot from that experience,” he said, looking at his tattoo. “So ‘grit’ is pretty self-explanatory.”
Fischetto’s second tattoo is a bust of the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, on his upper arm, which he received while going through the three-year selection process for special operations in the U.S. militairy. He explained Aurelius was a big proponent of stoicism, “a philosophy in which you recognize what is in your control and what is not, and you focus on things in your control.”
Also inspired by his time serving in special operations is a quotation by the poet Charles Bukowski on his forearm: “find what you love and let it kill you.”
Fischetto’s final tattoo is a matching piece with a friend from the military. “It’s a shark, and mine says ‘no bubbles’ and his says ‘no troubles.’” He explained this tattoo came from a phrase they shared when doing combat diving in the military. “You want to be stealthy,” he said. “You don’t want bubbles because you don’t want the enemy to see you.”
Fischetto’s adventure plans do not end at tattoos. He and Nick Ige ’25 aspire to be the first Harvard students to climb the tallest mountains in all seven continents, which he plans to subsequently have memorialized on his body. Fischetto’s ink is a map of his experiences, he explained, which he hopes will change and grow as he does.
Not all tatted Harvard students have professional tattoos. Some have opted for the at-home, “stick-and-poke” variety.
“I was on the floor of my dorm room with all my friends and they poked me,” said El Richards ’26, who has two triangles on her hip she acquired from a kit on Amazon. “It hurt so badly because mine is on my hip and my friends had to hold me down. It was the funniest thing ever. I thought I was going to die.”
Isabelle Behring ’26 does not look back on her stick-and-poke as fondly. She purchased Indian ink and needles with her best friend Isabella at 16, and the plan was to give each other matching tattoos of the letter ‘I,’ but the tattoos came out as dots. “I hate it,” she expressed. “I’m getting it tattooed over this year, I think.”
Yet Richards has no regrets. “It was such a good memory, and we all still have them,” she said. “We were bored, it was Covid-19, and we wanted something to remember our little group.
Indeed, tattoos may be as much about the time you got them as they are about the design itself. As Fischetto articulated, “one can look back at that moment in time and reflect on why you got them, and what place you were at in life.”
Maddy Tunnell ’26 (maddytunnell@college.harvard.edu) has four tattoos and talks about them too much.