Today I was classily scratching my back while standing in the office when one of my co-workers saw my back tattoo.  I guess dressed up in my work clothes I don’t look like the kind of person who is sprinkled with tattoos.  But I am.  And so when my co-worker saw them, she was surprised.  Very surprised.

She asked me if my tree was a family tree, and asked what the stars meant.  I explained that the design was based off of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and that each star stood for a member of the family.  She looked at me like I was crazy.  And a nerd.  Like I was a crazy nerd.

So I explained some more.  Dad used to read us the books when we were little, I said.  And he would always use stories from Lord of the Rings to help us in our own lives, drawing elaborate parallels to help us see that things would be okay.  He even had us all nicknamed after a character–whichever character most closely lined up with our personal life trajectories.

She finally understood the depth with which we loved these books.  Though she’d never been a big LotR fan, she admitted, she did see an interview with the lady that wrote the books a while back.

I asked, “Lady?”

She goes, “Yeah.”

I was like, “Um, Lord of the Rings. Not Harry Potter.”