TW: photos featuring old, faded self harm scars, brief mention of pet death, and brief mention of discrimination due to disability.

Back in 2022, I made a post about tattoo ideas to celebrate autistic identity, exploring some of the common ideas and then some more unique and/or abstract ones that people have gotten. I also shared some ideas of what I thought I might get as a tattoo to represent my autistic identity, having wanted to get a tattoo since I was about fifteen. I still like a lot of the more unusual ideas that I shared in the post – and I have actually ended up with a whale tattoo, inspired by the story of The Loneliest Whale – but inevitably I found a lot of different ideas in the years since I uploaded that post…

I think it’s probably safe to say that all of my tattoos are connected to my being autistic in some way because all of my tattoos are inspired by things that I love or that are important to me and I think that that response and sense of connection is ultimately due to the autistic lens through which I experience the world or because of events or moments connected to my autistic experience. For example, I have a tattoo of my cat, Lucy, who I got just before I was diagnosed and so she had seen me through that whole journey until she had to be put down last year. But there are definitely degrees to which my tattoos are related to my Autism and so I thought I’d shared the ones that are most deeply connected…