This tattoo from “Run Into Flowers” by M83
For a good, solid year this song was my soundtrack to everything; a constant point of reference at a time when everything shifted. As such, it seemed only fitting to etch a memorial to it into my skin. As you do. However, after I had this tattoo done I quickly discovered two things:
1. I had misunderstood the heavily distorted vocals in the song. Where I had heard, harvested and believed ‘I want to run to you’, the song actually says ‘I want to run into’. Flowers we can only presume.
2. The words I did end up having tattooed across my shoulders are far more famous as a lyric from a Bryan Adams song. I heard the song for the first time a few weeks after the tattoo was done. Timing is everything.
Nonetheless, I feel it stands as a proper memorial to the time. Misheard as they may have been, these words were my version of events. So rather than being a flat tribute to a band, the tattoo became instead a personal and flawed declaration of love for a piece of music that seemed to permit a lot of what followed. And one that has absolutely nothing, at all to do with Bryan Adams. So stop asking.
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I’ve been wanting for a long time to get a lyrics tattoo for my birthday, which is in three weeks. Like yours, it’s a line from a song that has been my life-soundtrack for a couple years now.
I realized last week that I’d been hearing the line wrong the entire time.
I’m still processing what this means for the tattoo idea.
In a lot of ways I’m glad I didn’t actually find out until afterwards – I was so nervous about getting the tattoo as was that having the meaning pulled out from underneath me like that might have foiled the whole project altogether. Still, it does make you think twice about these things…
At least you didn’t tattoo something like “hold me closer Tony Danza” or “Scuse me while I kiss this guy”. As another note, I have Whitney Houston’s “I Want to Run to You” stuck in my head now…..terrific. The tattoo, however, is fantastic, and you have a great story behind it, so it’s all good.
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