THE LAST HUNGARIAN FLAG

I’ve always been fascinated by the art of tattooing. I got my first one at 17 — the logo of my band on my right shoulder. With that band, we finished as the fifth-best act in the 2021 anniversary season of the X-Faktor talent show. My second tattoo came at 25: a Shakespeare quote over my heart — “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

When I was in my third year at university, Attila Vidnyánszky Jr. directed our exam performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which I played the role of Jaques. For me, a tattoo only has meaning if there’s a personal story behind it.

That’s how, not far from my house in Kingsland, I came across a legendary tattoo studio with more than a hundred years of history — Sacred Tattoo. I’d been thinking for a while about how to express my childhood — that carefree happiness that still feels so warm when I look back on it. Then I remembered how many times I watched Pom Pom Tales with my grandmother, who’s now watching over me from above. I loved those old, hand-drawn films. So now, this little ball of fluff looks out at the world from my left forearm.

David, my tattoo artist, came here from South Africa with his family in search of a better life. Before every tattoo, he’d put on an apron, like a chef before cooking. I once asked him where he was going next — he said Japan, to visit his daughter. I asked if he’d take his apron with him. He smiled and said he takes it everywhere. So when he took it off and stepped out for a moment at the end of the day, I carefully slipped a small Hungarian flag into his apron pocket — and that flag has since made it all the way to Japan.

Áron Darvai