On the meanings we carry

I have a full Norse mythology tattoo sleeve. Within it are a valknut and three runes: O, D, and M. They’re part of how I connect to my ancestors, and having them on my skin makes that connection feel personal in a way that reading about the mythology never could.

But some of those marks also carry associations with people whose beliefs I completely reject. Racism, white supremacy, and Nazi ideology have attached themselves to parts of the same visual language I’ve chosen to carry.

I find that difficult to untangle, because knowing what they mean to me doesn’t make those other associations disappear.

There are specific histories here, and I want to be careful with them. Othala, the O rune, was adopted by the Nazis and subsequently by white supremacists. The valknut has also been appropriated by white supremacist groups. Both have non-racist uses, and context matters; the ADL’s entries on Othala and the valknut explicitly acknowledge that. It would be wrong to flatten every rune, or Norse mythology as a whole, into those associations.

Still, context is a complicated thing when the thing you’re talking about is on your arm.

I know why I chose my sleeve. Someone seeing it has access to the image, and whatever knowledge or experience they bring to it. My explanation might never enter that encounter. And although I can explain my own relationship with those marks, I can’t ask someone to forget the relationship they already have with them.

That doesn’t mean every interpretation is equally accurate. It does mean that my intention is only part of what’s being communicated.

I think this is where it starts to connect with how we make things.

In design, we choose from visual languages that already exist. A typeface, a symbol, a colour, or a particular arrangement can appeal to us for its form, whilst carrying a history we haven’t encountered. We bring it into something new, and give it a purpose, but the people who encounter it bring their own associations too.

As designers, we spend a lot of time thinking about what we want something to communicate. This makes me wonder how much time we spend understanding what it might already communicate before we touch it.

Engineering carries this further, although the relationship changes. A system can inherit assumptions through its categories, defaults, and dependencies. We might adopt a convention because it’s familiar or technically convenient, then build around it until a decision we barely noticed has become part of how the product treats people.

A form that requires everyone to fit one model of a family, for example, makes that model part of the experience. The person implementing it might simply be following an existing schema. For the person who can’t describe their family within it, that technical explanation doesn’t change what the form allows them to do.

That’s a different kind of consequence from a tattoo’s association, but I think the connection is in how easily our own reasons can become the whole explanation in our heads. We know why we chose something, so we feel we understand the choice. There may be more attached to it than we’ve considered.

And this gets harder when the choice matters to us.

It’s easy to reconsider something we don’t care about. When it connects to our identity, our history, or work we’re proud of, examining it can feel like being asked to give something up. I don’t want racist appropriation to determine my relationship with my ancestors. I also don’t want that relationship to become a reason to dismiss the history of the marks themselves.

Both thoughts remain there.

I don’t have a neat resolution for my sleeve, and I’m wary of turning something this personal into a set of instructions for better design. But it has made me more conscious that we don’t always get to explain what something means to us, or why we chose it. Someone encounters it through their own associations, and those shape how they see it, and perhaps how they see us too. In the work, I think that means assuming I won’t be there to explain why something is the way it is, and considering what it communicates in my absence.

I know what’s on my arm, and why it means something to me. I’m still working through what else comes with it.