50 Strangers Voted on My Tattoo and Now It Lives on My Body Forever
Let me paint you a picture. It's a Tuesday afternoon. I'm standing outside a Cinnabon in a New Jersey mall holding a clipboard, asking people I have never met — and will likely never see again — to decide what gets permanently etched into my skin. A woman in a Crocs-and-capris combo just suggested a wizard riding a Roomba. A teenager said, without hesitation, "a hot dog but make it sad."
This is democracy at its most unhinged. And I signed up for every second of it.
Why Would Anyone Do This
Honest answer? Because the alternative — making a decision myself — felt somehow worse. I'd been going back and forth on getting a tattoo for two years. Two years. I had a Pinterest board with 47 pins and zero conviction. Every time I landed on something I liked, I'd spiral: What if I hate it at 40? What if it doesn't age well? What if my future kids think it's embarrassing?
So I did what any reasonable person at R4ND.org would do: I outsourced the whole thing to strangers and called it a social experiment.
The rules were simple. I'd collect suggestions from three groups — people on the street, people at a mall, and people online via a post in a couple of Reddit communities and a Twitter poll. Each person got one vote. After 50 responses, whatever concept had the most support would go on my body. Permanently. No takebacks.
My tattoo artist, Dani, thought I was "either brave or deeply unwell." Possibly both.
Phase One: The Street Corner Gauntlet
I set up shop outside a coffee shop in Hoboken on a Saturday morning, which, if you know Hoboken, means my respondent pool skewed heavily toward hungover people in athleisure. This turned out to be extremely informative.
Out of 18 people I approached, 14 actually stopped. Suggestions included: a compass (classic, boring, two votes), a snake eating a pizza slice (three votes, surprisingly passionate advocates), a small ghost wearing sunglasses (two votes), the word "oops" in cursive (one vote, delivered completely seriously), and a geometric bear (two votes from people who definitely have geometric bears themselves).
One guy, probably mid-40s, wearing a fleece vest, looked me dead in the eyes and said, "Get a portrait of someone you've never met. Find a random face online. That's the bit." He then walked away before I could respond. Sir, I think about you constantly.
Street phase tally leader: pizza snake, with three votes.
Phase Two: Mall People Are a Different Species
The mall crowd — specifically the one near the food court at a mid-tier New Jersey shopping center — operates on a completely different frequency. These are people who have time. They leaned in. They debated. One family of four spent four minutes arguing among themselves before submitting a single vote for "a lighthouse, but make it look tired."
A group of teenage girls immediately formed a committee and collectively decided I needed a frog holding a tiny sword. They were extremely firm about this. The frog needed attitude, they specified. It needed to look like it had been through some things.
An older gentleman near the Sunglass Hut suggested a bald eagle wearing a cowboy hat, "because that's America, and you should be proud." Two votes for that one.
Mall phase surprise entry: the attitude frog with a sword, pulling four votes and the most enthusiastic endorsement of the entire experiment.
Phase Three: The Internet Is Exactly As Chaotic As You Think
I posted in r/CasualConversation and r/mildlyinteresting, plus a Twitter poll with six options I'd already collected. The internet, predictably, went feral.
The Reddit thread got 200 comments in two hours. Half of them were people asking if I was serious. A quarter were people who had tattoo opinions they'd clearly been waiting years to share with someone. The remaining quarter were people suggesting increasingly unhinged concepts, including a detailed recreation of the "This is Fine" dog meme, a QR code that links to a rickroll, and — my personal favorite — "just the word 'wifi' so people think you're a hotspot."
For the purposes of the experiment, I capped online votes at 18 to match the other groups and weighted the most-upvoted suggestions.
Online phase winner: the frog with a sword again, picking up six more votes from people who apparently share the teenage girls' vision.
The Final Tally (And the Moment of Reckoning)
After 50 votes across all three phases, here's how it broke down:
- 🐸 Attitude frog with a tiny sword: 13 votes (winner)
- 🍕 Snake eating a pizza slice: 9 votes
- 🦅 Bald eagle in a cowboy hat: 7 votes
- 👻 Ghost in sunglasses: 5 votes
- 🧭 Compass: 4 votes
- Everything else: scattered
The frog won. Decisively. And so I went to Dani's studio on a Friday afternoon, showed her the results, and watched her face go through approximately six emotions before settling on "okay, I can work with this."
She drew up a design: a small, slightly chonky frog, gripping a little sword with both hands, expression somewhere between determined and exhausted. Attitude, as requested. It looks like he's seen things. It looks like he persists anyway.
It now lives on the inside of my left forearm.
What 50 Strangers Actually Taught Me
Here's the thing I wasn't expecting: I love it. Not in a "I'm making peace with a bad decision" way. In a genuinely, weirdly moved way.
Because that frog is the product of a woman in Crocs, a fleece vest guy with a wild soul, four teenagers with strong opinions, a family who saw a tired lighthouse and felt something, and hundreds of internet strangers who just... participated. Every single one of them gave a tiny piece of themselves to this ridiculous project.
There's something almost profound about that — or at least as profound as a frog with a sword can get. The crowd didn't give me something meaningless. They gave me something that represents this exact moment, this exact dumb experiment, this decision to let go of control and see what happened.
Also the frog genuinely does have great attitude. The teenagers were right.
Would I do it again? Absolutely not. Would I do it again tomorrow? ...Probably.
If you want to vote on my next terrible life decision, you know where to find us. R4ND.org. We're always here, making things weird.
