When you happen to write about tattoo a lot, eventually you reach this point where it gets harder and harder for you to be surprised by people’s tattoos and their different reasons for getting them. That doesn’t mean that I don’t find people’s tattoos cool or think that they’ve come up with a clever idea for a tattoo, but in general, it often feels like I’ve seen it all before.
That’s how I feel about Brisbane, Australia’s Glen Robinson and his interesting method of asking his girlfriend to marry him. It’s not that I don’t think that it’s kind of cool that Robinson had “Will You Marry Me” tattooed on his wrists so that he could present them to his girlfriend, Michelle Bate, it’s just that I’m positive that I’ve already seen someone do something similar to this at one time or another. I just can’t remember who, when or where.
That doesn’t matter though, the important thing is that Robinson had the guts to do this in the first place.
‘“To some people it’s probably a very, very extreme thing. For me, I’ve got a few … so it’s not as bizarre to me,” Glen said.
“So one thing led to another and I got the tattoo.”
That evening, with the new tattoo still raw, Glen bent on one knee in the couple’s living room with a ring in his open palms.
“Michelle wasn’t feeling well that night … she was lying on the couch,” he said.
“I came home and sat down beside her on the knee and said, ‘Hopefully, this will make you feel better’.”
Michelle said, “Are you going to ask me something?”
Glen tactfully replied, “Surely you can read.”
Michelle said ‘yes’.
“I said, ‘Yes! But I don’t know what I think about that [tattoo]’.”
Michelle, a primary school teacher and swimmer who competed at the Barcelona Paralympics in 1992, then had a question for Glen.
“Where’s the question mark?” she said.
“His answer was, ‘It wasn’t a question’.”’
All in all, it’s a pretty cool way to ask someone to marry you. Plus, he’ll always have the tattoo as a constant reminder of the day that he asked his girlfriend to be his wife. Good luck to them both.