Nicolas Chevobbe

I got a tattoo

In the beginning of 2021 I got my first tattoo:

A tatto on my wrists, view from the top. On the left one a chevron pointing to the right; on the right one an arrow pointing to the left

Yes, that’s (almost) the Firefox DevTools WebConsole icons, but there’s more to it.

It all started last year, in Berlin, where Mozilla held the last All Hands before the pandemic really hit. I can’t remember the detail, but at some point Jason Laster suggested I should get a WebConsole tattoo, and for some reason, it stuck in my head. I wasn’t ready to get it right away, I hadn’t had any tattoo before, and although it always attracted me, I always feared I would get bored of a piece in the long run.

But here, it was different. The design came to my mind pretty fast, and it was simple and small, and it felt like I wouldn’t get over it over time. It would be a reminder of how contributing to Firefox DevTools changed my career and my life, taking me to a place I wouldn’t have dreamed of when I was a student. Taking a step further, this also represents how much I love being a programmer, after all it’s a classic REPL design, which we interact with every day. And further away, it can be seen as a symbol for Persistance: you have to put effort IN to have a chance to get something OUT (even if not guaranteed).

I sat on it for a while, and some events made me think of another bigger, tattoo idea. The WebConsole tattoo now felt like an harmless thing I could do to check if I could handle being tattooed (I don’t handle pain and anxiety very well). I took the plunge in the beginning of January and got the tatto without fainting (it was close though 😅).

To the next one now 🙂