A tattoo commemorating an inside joke between two friends gained new significance after the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
The story: Inspired a friend’s kind words, Leah Holland decided to get a tattoo in March of last year.
- “We were just talking about things we admire about each other and he said, ‘You courageously and radically refuse to wear a mask,’ like meaning that I’m undeniably myself. I thought that was a really poetic way of saying that,” Holland, a Georgetown, Kentucky resident, told NBC affiliate Lex 18 News this week.
- Unaware that the pandemic – and a fiercely politicized culture war over the wearing of masks – was just around the corner, Holland tattooed the words, “courageously & radically refuse to wear a mask,” on her forearm.
- A video Holland posted to TikTok on Monday, as part of a “dumbest tattoo” challenge, went viral and led to an interview with Buzzfeed.
The clarification: Holland told Buzzfeed when Kentucky announced its first case of COVID-19, just two days after she got the tattoo, she “didn’t think that the anti-maskers were going to be such a thing.”
- Holland made clear she is not an “anti-masker,” saying she “spent the entire summer wearing cardigans so that could not be misconstrued.”
- “For most of the summer, I was mortified,” she added.
The culture war: The wearing of masks has become an ideological dividing line for many Americans.
- According to a Pew Research Center analysis published in October, “no topic divides Democrats and Republicans more than the subject of masks.”
- Pew found that Republicans tend to be more skeptical of masks, while Democrats are more concerned about others not wearing them.