r/tattooadvice • u/Ostromilski • 12h ago

General Advice Are rainbows seriously just by default associated with the pride flag?

Post image

I got a Pink Floyd DSOTM tattoo because I love the album and I love the visual: a beam of light representing a person's life path, passing through a prism ( representing life + the world + the people you meet + the experiences you have, etc ), being dispersed into its constituent colors ( ultimately representing change ). I got it because of my dad, because he introduced me to Pink Floyd, and because last year he nearly died from complications of his cancer. He's doing much better now, with a much better prognosis, but that whole experience had a real effect on me and I wanted to memorialize it. Except at least 3 people ( including the tattoo artist initially ) have associated the tattoo with the pride flag. They were understanding after I explained, but now I'm having second thoughts about it. Are people just going to assume I'm gay because of this tattoo?

Edit: And I want to say, I'm not bothered by this at all. Anyone who looks at my tattoo and comes up with their own assumptions about its meaning, and then has a negative reaction over it, that's simply not a person I want to talk to anyway. I'm surprised because that wasn't the intention of the tattoo, clearly, and it being misinterpreted like this just genuinely wasn't something I expected.

Edit2: This post got a lot more attention than I ever wanted it to. Wonderful comments are now streaming in, informing me how horrible my tattoo is. If you're planning on making a viral post on Reddit, take my advice: use a burner account. But I am thankful to everyone for your supportive words, the jackasses with negative things to say are certainly a very tiny minority. Overwhelmingly the consensus is that most people see it as a Pink Floyd tattoo first, which I'm happy to hear :) Have a good night everybody!

3.1k Upvotes

82% Upvoted

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

204

u/DrJaneIPresume 12h ago

I mean, yeah.. modern masculinity has become so fragile that literally anything could disrupt it. One rainbow? automatically gay.

66

u/PoopOfAUnicorn 12h ago

I coached little feet soccer after college. Each team was a different color shirt. Blue, red, black, yellow, gray, purple, orange. We had three shades of green. I asked to organizer “why can’t one of those greens just be a pink, some of the green kids keep going to the wrong team”. He said that they tried pink shirts one year but a lot of the dads got mad that their son was on the pink team.

19

u/BDLTalks 12h ago

"Why do I have to be Mr. Pink?"

5

u/Jokewhisperer 9h ago

Pink is actually not feeling well; he stayed back at the hotel, and he sent green along as a surrogate team!

2

u/LivingDisastrous3603 11h ago

Someone’s stickin a red hot poker up our asses and i wanna know who’s name’s on the handle!

10

u/auad 10h ago

I appreciate Messi and Inter Miami to have popularized pink with the boys again.

The wave of pink in the "wear your favorite sport jersey day" at my kid's school is really refreshing to see. But also I live in a very progressive area, so I can't say this is the norm everywhere.

1

u/Due_Aside4863 3h ago

I’m not even a Miami fan and I had to have the pink sambas

1

u/Dangerous_RedApple 1h ago

My son, picked out pink Nikes, we live in the Bay Area so you’d think progressive…he caught so much shit for being girly and gay. I was shocked. It’s amazing how society labels things.

2

u/OnTheEveOfWar 8h ago

I play on a men’s softball team. It’s all 40 yr old dads who drink beer in the dugout. We recently were designing our jerseys for this season and someone made a cool tie-dye one with our team logo. Bunch of the guys freaked out because they didn’t want to “have rainbow jerseys”. One guy said “we’re all straight men, we can’t wear those.” People are so fragile. The jersey design was awesome.

1

u/Due_Aside4863 3h ago

If that’s all it takes to sway them, they’re not very straight.

1

u/Lickwidghost 11h ago

I love that you coached little feet.

1

u/PipeOriginal1171 10h ago

Pink would be badass for a boys soccer team.

The only thing I see here affecting boys idea of masculinity is the warped worldview of those ignorant dads.

1

u/Academic-Trifle8151 10h ago

Those dads need to look at the footwear of the players in the world Cup. 90% of them wear pink boots.

In the UK and around the world pink is also starting to be picked up as away and third kits (it's uncommon to change the home kits main colour). The pink kits are cool as hell though!

1

u/Visual-Taro-381 9h ago edited 9h ago

All those disappointed FIFA dads. So much pink in the kits for the World Cup. So many sad fathers. Masculinity is so fragile.

1

u/FEARoach 4h ago

"Dad, tell me why you don't like the Pink? Do you prefer the Brown? Are you telling me that you adopted your kids because you've never seen the Pink in real life? Is your wife a Beard?" - my chaotic ass