Sam

Sam

he/him/they

Sam’s two most recent tattoos sit close together on his right wrist and arm, small in size but carrying one of the biggest stories in his collection. They mark his AuDHD diagnosis, autism and ADHD, received in his early forties, which gave him a new lens on a lifetime of experiences he’d spent years trying to explain or compensate for.

One tattoo shows the molecular structure of serotonin. The other is a visual representation of a heartbeat, its line interrupted by a section of noisy squiggle at the centre.

For Sam, tattoos have always been about ownership: taking something internal, a memory, an emotion, part of his identity, and putting it somewhere he can see it. These two mark the point where he stopped viewing his neurodivergence as something to overcome and started seeing it as a strength. They also mark a shift in his relationship with his body. As a gay man who has been bigger since childhood, he spent years feeling his body didn’t match what he was supposed to aspire to. Tattoos became a way of making his body reflect who he actually is, rather than someone else’s idea of how it should look.

Sam works as a nurse, a Senior Multi-Professional Practice Educator and a podcaster, professions where assumptions about how a professional should look still persist. He sees his tattoos, his size, his sexuality and his neurodivergence not as things that undermine his capability, but as part of what has shaped him into the person who does that work. He wants the project to challenge the idea that there’s one way for a queer man, or a professional, or a successful person, to look.