Say it with ink
Just about a year ago around Valentine's Day, Butler native Daniel Maticic and girlfriend McKenzi Glenn of Plain Grove made a commitment — to matching tattoos.
Daniel said the symbol is a personal insignia of his.
“It's a heart with a ring around it,” he said.
Every part of the shape has meaning.
“There's a 'B' at the top for my dad (Bob) and a little kind of a cross that's a 'T' for my mom (Terry). On the bottom there's an 'M' for Maticic. If you flip it upside down, there are three little crosses because I have three sisters. There are seven dots … 'cause seven is one of my lucky numbers, and there are six more dots on the top to fill out 13 dots for M as the 13th letter in the alphabet.”
His tattooed symbol is behind his right ear. McKenzi has the same drawing inside her right ankle.
They said the pair of tattoos is not exactly the same, though.
“I forgot it was there, and I scratched behind my ear,” Daniel said. “It pulled the scab off and let the ink out,” he recalled.
A small part of a line is just a bit altered.
They decided to get tattooed together when they went to a Pittsburgh convention of the artists last February. “I had planned on getting that tattoo for a while,” Daniel said.
Their tattoos took about 10 minutes each to get inked, and they said the locations behind his ear and on her ankle weren't particularly painful. Daniel said he'd always wanted to get one behind his ear, and McKenzi said the placement of hers was just random. “My mom didn't even notice it on my ankle at first,” McKenzi said. “Then when she saw it, she said 'Hey, I've seen that somewhere before …'
McKenzi, who has 10 other tattoos, just got some of that additional ink recently.Daniel said he has only three tattoos but they're large ones. “When they start touching each other then I think of that as just one,” he said.All the tattoos he has took about 60-plus hours to sit through, he said. “The only one that really bugged me was behind my knee,” he noted.McKenzi said the one that bothered her most approached the inside of her elbow.Daniel was himself a tattoo artist for a while. “There are about 200 tattoos out there I did,” he said. “I got more and more moxie as I went along. It didn't always work out!”Tattooed togetherThe ink is still fresh on the couples' tattoos of Barry and Jade Steele of Jefferson Township. They got her “Beauty” and his “Beast” in fancy scripts on their forearms just about a month ago.“We both wanted to get some type of tattoo that wasn't each other's name that would work independently and together,” said Barry. “We wanted to have a symbol to show how we feel about each other.”He said his tattoo is an Old English lettering but Jade's is a bit different. “Jade said she wanted something a little more elegant that flowed,” he added.Jade said, “I just told (the artist) to surprise me.” She did get to see the stencil of the word before she got the tattoo.
Barry said these are not their first tattoos and probably won't be their last ones either. “Oh yeah I plan on getting more … I don't think we'll run out of space,” he said. “There's a lot of skin on the body.”Jade, too, said she wants to get more tattoos. She's already thinking about what her next one will be.“I want cheetah prints from my shoulder blade down my arm,” Jade said. “I don't know but I just love cheetahs. I'm obsessed with them. I don't think I'm going to stop liking them.”Barry has some advice for anyone thinking about getting a tattoo: Don't do it on the spur of the moment.“The only thing I can say is I don't recommend just showing up at a tattoo parlor,” he said. “I always put serious thought into any tattoo I get. Any tattoo I get means a lot to me. You're going to be living with it for the rest of your life.”“The first tattoo I got is inside of my forearm. I wanted that one since I was 16, and I got it at age 22. I considered it for a long time,” he noted. “I think that's a pretty good example of taking your time.”
