“Tattoo Tales” is a series in which The Butler Collegian speaks with a Butler community member about their tattoos and the stories behind them. Read on to discover the next of our Tattoo Tales through a Q&A style interview.
Many people get tattoos for their deep personal importance or as reminders of life lessons. MFA student and literary influencer Nathan Shuherk — boasting over 185K TikTok followers — challenges this idea with the belief that bodies can be decorated with little to no meaning. Shuherk places an emphasis on fun and good design in tattoos, and that often carries its own significance.
THE BUTLER COLLEGIAN: Can you explain the overarching theme that you want to have with your tattoos?
NATHAN SHUHERK: The only rules that I have for my tattoos right now are [that I have] black and white on my upper half and color on my lower half. That’s really the only guiding principle. Other than that, I just find artists, art or inspiration from the things around me. Typically, there’s not a lot of planning that goes into it. [I] normally just have an idea, shoot off some emails and see what can come of it.
TBC: Do you have a favorite tattoo of yours?
NS: My favorite tattoo is this jellyfish that I have on my shin. It’s a neo-modern kind of look — I really like it — and then this is a full traditional sleeve that I really like. My right arm is all [by] the same artist, except for a couple things. I just followed the idea of what I love in nature [and] finding little things. I put one of my cats on my hand because I was doing all of the plants and animals that I love, and I thought putting my own cat on the top of my hand would be very sentimental, so I see it all the time. I’m often petting him while his own tattoo is very visible.
TBC: Your tattoos seem to have a large connection to nature. Can you expand on that?
NS: Nature was something I just found along the way. A lot of my older tattoos are referencing media that I love, so it’s song lyrics or it’s movies or TV that I’ve really fallen in love with. Then I started getting into nature [tattoos] because I’m very into nature writing and the topics of being outside and going for walks … A lot of the animals on my arm are topics of books that I’ve read, and I just wanted to [pay] homage to them at some point. Also, the tattoo artist that was doing those really does like doing animal tattoos but hadn’t done most of the animals that I wanted to do, so I was very excited to work with the spaces of my arm and see what would fit where.
TBC: What are some of the media reference tattoos that you mentioned?
NS: I’ve got a symbol from “Arrival”, [and] I’ve got the maze from “Westworld”. This [whale] is from one of my favorite essay collections by Leslie Jamison. This [equation] is from “A Beautiful Mind”. The octopus is a myriad of things — there’s been several different octopus documentaries that I’ve really loved. Also, the octopus features very heavily in a lot of Sy Montgomery’s works. An owl is one of my favorite animals, and I’ve read a few books on the science and migratory patterns of owls that I find really fascinating. The tree stump is from a Tyler Childers song. The jellyfish is from a scientist’s memoir that I really love … “Slow Down”, which I have on my knuckles, is my favorite [piece of] Marxist history. It’s a degrowth manifesto about the economics of how we should consider climate change, so I get to have a little philosophy book on my knuckles. Then I’ve got a Kermit the Frog [tattoo]. Obviously, that’s just Kermit the Frog. That’s a fun one.
My legs are a little bit more fun than my upper body. I’ve got some Bo Burnham lyrics on my calf because I watched “Inside” and kind of lost my mind in 2020, so I figured [I could use] a little thing like that. I got a UFO picking up Bigfoot, and that’s simply because I very much lost myself in the throes of 2020 to conspiracy podcasts and diving deep into the weird worlds that surround us … I would just go for walks and listen to people spout off a bunch of nonsense, and I thought it was funny. So, now I somewhat regrettably have a pretty bad tattoo of a UFO picking up Bigfoot.
TBC: Which tattoo took the longest to get?
NS: My Bo Burnham tattoo was one of that tattoo artist’s first tattoos. He was my friend that became an apprentice, and he was really struggling with the stencil. It was a 3 ½-hour tattoo, and it was one of the most painful things. I remember getting it sometime during the football season because I went to a Colts game the next day, and I could barely walk. I was hobbling around the stadium in so much pain. It’s the most painful a tattoo’s ever been for me.
TBC: What is the most meaningful tattoo you have?
Nash’s Equilibrium underscores everything else on Shuherk’s arm. Photo by Darcy Leber.
NS: This is my very first tattoo. This is a math equation called Nash’s Equilibrium, which won the Nobel [Peace Prize] years and years after it was published. John Nash Jr. was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was in graduate school, and I was diagnosed with schizophrenia as an undergrad student. When I was 20, I was in the throes of psychosis and not sure how my life would turn out and all these types of things. I didn’t know what my future looked like, and I just got that as a small reminder of [how] life continues on, life keeps progressing. Even in the hardest parts of whatever we’re dealing with, there is at least some hopeful silver lining that things can get better or that you will find some semblance of a life that’s unconventional or unexpected as it might be.
TBC: Do you ever integrate your tattoos into the content of your videos?
NS: Well, I mean, they’re always visible, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to get my hands tattooed. Getting my hands tattooed was a high priority for me because I see my hands in my work all the time, so when I’m filming myself, I’m holding a book or I gesture with my hands a lot. And I’ve never liked my hands. I’ve never liked how short my fingers are, how stubby they are. I never felt comfortable with my hands and having to see them over and over again on video. So, I decided to get them pretty aggressively tattooed, and ever since then I’ve felt at least neutral about my hands or at least that I love the artwork that’s on them. Being on camera and having a thing that’s publicly recognizable [has] been kind of fun because I get asked a lot of questions about the tattoos, and also I just hate myself a little less when I have to watch my old videos for some reason or another.
TBC: How do you think your tattoos have raised your confidence as you’ve gotten more and more?
NS: I’m always in a state of trying to feel more grounded in who I am as a person … I think tattoos give me a sense that I am making the choices of who I am, like the world is not happening to me. I am happening to it in some way. The tattoos are this recognition that my body is something that I am constantly finagling, [something] I am constantly working on. I wouldn’t say [it’s] always improving in any real sense, but that the body that I have now has happened over years and years of effort and laziness and exhaustion and all of the different things that lead into life. The tattoos are just one of those more enjoyable but also painful parts of that story.
TBC: Is there anything else you’d like to share?
NS: Can I give tattoo advice?
TBC: Absolutely.
NS: Your first tattoo does not need to be incredibly meaningful. The meaning of your tattoos will change over time. Secondly, the biggest piece of advice that I have for people looking to get a tattoo is to just find art that you enjoy … Find [an artist] that you would like to work with [and see] what they can do with your idea … They know how to make it look cool on a body. They know how to design it in a way that speaks to the history of tattoos and the culture of tattoos … whatever is impactful and meaningful to you now will not be that way five years or 10 years from now … It’s not so much the meaning of it that stays the same. It’s that you will wear it. You can wear something that’s collaborative. You can wear something that is like an artistic conversation that you’re having with yourself and an idea that you’re having, but also with an artist too.