I was eating dinner with a group of friends the other night and the topic of tattoos came up. Through the course of the conversation, we discovered something amusing; more than half of the people in the group had sun tattoos! What was even more interesting was that each of us who had one of these tattoos felt that it represented something strikingly different from what the other people thought about their own tattoos.

For example, I had gotten the tattoo just before leaving Florida to represent the time that I had spent in The Sunshine State. Another girl in the group had gotten a tattoo of the sun because she lived in London where it rained all of the time and she wanted to battle her Seasonal Affective Disorder with a cheery tattoo. One of the guys in the group had gotten matching heart tattoos with a girlfriend and then covered his up with a sun when the relationship went awry; he said it was his way of reminding himself there would be sunnier days up ahead.

Of course, there were other tattoos in the group as well (2 people had tribal tattoos, for example) but it was interesting to see how many of us had chosen suns as the symbol that was important to us. Although, I guess it does make sense when you think about it; the sun is what gives us life after all!

Technorati Tags: sun tattoos, heart tattoos, tribal tattoos