By this point, you’d either have to be living in a cave somewhere in a desert or completely devoid of all your senses to not have seen the ice bucket challenge. It’s everywhere. Celebrities and regular Joes alike take the challenge, which is a charitable dousing in ice cold water, for ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease research. Lots of money is being raised for a very serious illness and that is a truly great thing. Not too many people would argue with that, right?
Well, yes and no. Some people are critical of the fact that the challenge uses a lot of water while so many people around the world die each year of thirst and have no access to clean drinkable water. When you consider people sitting in countries with heavily polluted water streams while the rest of the world tosses around clean drinking water for kicks, I can see the point in the criticism. I’m not sure of the exact number of people who die each year from thirst, but you can look it up if you’re so inclined – it’s not that hard to find and I’m trying to swing this back around to tattoo before I lose your attention. Sound good? Perfect.
Anyway, yesterday in my post I happened to mention tattoo, er, enthusiast Matthew Whelan. Matthew is most recently known by his legal name King of Ink Land King Body Art the Extreme Ink-ite and his tattoos are quite extensive. King of Ink (I’m going to just refer to him by this name from now on for the sake of brevity), is one of those aforementioned people who feels that water is a very important life source for human beings and other living things and that the people who are denied it should be considered. And so, instead of taking an ice bucket challenge and dousing himself in water for ALS, King of Ink had a tattoo of an ice bucket inked just below his hairline for the charity Water Aid. He said:
‘“While I have most respect for people donating to charity, Water Aid is a fantastic cause and I’m sure there are many people who struggle to access clean water and would not understand the challenge.’
I personally am of the opinion that any form of charity for any sort of worthy cause is a great and noble thing. King of Ink might take a bit of flack for not taking part in the ice bucket challenge, but he’s branching out and doing something different for a very important cause. His actions are going to open the eyes of many people and for that I think he’s doing something really positive. It would be interesting to see people take up his challenge and begin getting tattoos of ice buckets, but I doubt that is going to happen. At any rate, King of Ink’s own tattooed appearance and confidence to push things in another, interesting direction is a great help for the Water Aid charity. Who knows, maybe his example is just what you’ve been waiting for. Go on out there and get a tattoo and challenge someone else for charity – any charity, whichever one works best for you. Or not…
Either way, well done King Ink!