Tattoo #5 ~ Williamstown, NJ ~ May 2025
- patrickwittwer
- May 20
- 2 min read
I don't know how or when it happened, but somewhere along the line, my thirtysomething, inkless self decided it would be cool to document my travels on my skin. Maybe each tattoo will represent the trip, maybe they'll make reference to an experience, or maybe they will just be a cool design that I thought was appropriate at the moment. Whatever they end up being, they'll end up here with a little story to go along.
My first two tattoos were roughly three years apart, and the same was true for the time between numbers two and three. My fourth tattoo was two years after number three, and now, just about one year later, comes number five. The theme and placement go back to an idea I had in my 20s, but came to fruition in my 40s because of a new job.
In late 2023, I joined the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum of Rowan University, which will be a Culturally Attracted story for another day. After over a year of preparation and hard work, I finally got to hire the visitor experience team in February of 2025. The team immediately formed a strong bond and, by day three of orientation, there was talk of getting matching tattoos.
Given that a large part of the museum focuses on dinosaurs, it was pretty much agreed upon that we'd be getting a prehistoric creature of some sort. This worked out well - way back in the days of working at the Franklin Institute I had tried to convince friends to get matching dinosaur tattoos. I wanted a cartoony stegosaurus on my left ankle to fortify the joint that had been degraded by my brief stint as a cross country runner in high school. Solid, science-backed logic.
Fast forward nearly twenty years and I was once again working in a science museum surrounded by nerds, but this group of nerds was 100% down for getting matching ink. When one member of the team, Ria, got accepted into a dream master's program out of state, it gave us the perfect deadline to get inked. The group of over 15 from the team all agreed to use a mosasaur illustration done by the museum's graphic designer to be a shoe charm.
The day before Ria's last day, the first seven of us took turns getting tattooed by Nick at DNA Tattooing in Williamstown, roughly 20 minutes from the museum in Sewell. Nick's space was as lovely and inviting as Shannon's at AMP in Philly and Nick was fantastic. Several more members of the team are lining up to get their mosasaurs, several of whom are getting their first tattoos as a part of this group.
In my career, I've had the privilege of working with some amazing people. This team is just as amazing as any other I've had the pleasure of hiring, but I have never seen a group of coworkers bond so quickly and strongly. It is an absolute pleasure working with them each day and I'm so happy to have shared this experience with them. But I still need that dinosaur tattoo - mosasaurs are marine lizards from the Cretaceous period but not actually dinosaurs. Maybe tattoo number six?
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