Hello, my name is Jeff, I’m a 31 year old Taurus living in Seattle, WA.I knew I wanted a 4×4 that was both a phrase straight across and a polarity, a black/white, night/day binary. -dirt life- is my working class pride tattoo. My buddy, who has -wrkn clas- on his knuckles, and I were discussing working class issues and our true enjoyment of being working class, free from the pressures of social mobility. He said to me “man, the way I look at it, I came from dirt, I’m always gonna be dirt, and I’m gonna die in the dirt.” It was like a beautiful brick hit my stomach. I sat on it for 24 hours and asked for his consent in making that idea my knuckle tattoo.I truly spent my life in the dirt because my mother was a gardener, I mostly played in the woods and in ditches and in the dirty Mississippi River, I work in coffee now which comes from dirt and coffee on your skin and clothes looks like dirt. It’s just me. I also like that it mocks the morality around poorness, such as the phrase “dirt poor” common in my home state of Louisiana. I have taken that morality and claimed it as my own, with honor. I have also been listening to Tupac a lot and it’s a tongue-in-cheek nod to his phrase THUG LIFE. Taurus is an Earth sign-more dirt. The polarity of -dirt- and -life- is very dynamic and very interesting to me on many levels. It, along with my Taurus glyph on my neck, is my favorite tattoo. It’s my way of recontextualizing something that is normally negative and derogatory.
