In the past ten years, the number of tattoo parlors in Brabant has tripled, according to figures from the Chamber of Commerce. It is estimated that a third of Dutch people have one or more tattoos. We asked Brabanders about the tattoos they are most proud of. Tamara Brekelmans from Waalwijk has a tattoo with a beautiful memory of her father: “My mother had always kept the note and I thought: ‘I have to do something with that’.”
When Tamara was little she always went swimming in the Zidewinde swimming pool in Sprang-Capelle. One afternoon the lifeguard jokingly said to her, “I want to buy you.” Once home, Tamara told the story to her father. Her father said, “That’s fine, he can buy you for 125 billion.”
“I always thought, I still have to do something with that.”
“I was completely shocked by that answer and my father saw it. He said, ‘Girl, do you know how many zeros that is?'” She didn’t know, so her father wrote out 125,000,000,000 on a note. “Then I saw that it was okay because the lifeguard could never pay that amount.”
Two weeks later, her father died unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of 42. Her mother has always kept Tamara’s ‘price tag’. “I always thought, I still have to do something with that. I wanted to get a tattoo in memory of my father and then I immediately thought of the note.” Around the age of thirty, Tamara immortalized the note on her arm.
Nineteen-year-old Mandy van der Bruggen from Den Bosch was bullied for years. When she first heard the lyrics to the song ‘Wolken’ by Flemming, she immediately burst into tears. “I was bullied from the age of four to seventeen because I was different from the other girls. These lyrics were exactly my story.”
“He thought it was very nice too.”
She decided to get a tattoo of it, but in Flemming’s own handwriting. “I almost stalked him so that I could have him write out the lyrics. After the release of a new single, the time came and he wrote the lyrics on a piece of paper: ‘I was always in the clouds because within these clouds I can be who I am. want to be.’
When she told Flemming that she wanted to get a tattoo of the lyrics, the Brabant singer reacted with surprise. “But I think he also really liked it.”
Tamara and Mandy are certainly not the only people from Brabant with a tattoo with a special story. A lot of other Brabanders also shared a photo of the tattoo they are most proud of:
