Nobody who knew me at school was surprised when I got my first tattoo. I’d spent my entire school career drawing on my own arms — margins, hands, whatever skin was within reach of a pen during a lesson. Teachers called it a habit to break. I’ve come to think it was the opposite: it was attention doing exactly what it does, with nowhere better to go.
Here’s the reframe I keep coming back to. We treat attention like a tap — on or off, enough or not enough. For a lot of ADHD brains, it isn’t a tap. It’s a current that’s always running, and the only real question is where it gets routed. Give it nothing to do and it doesn’t switch off — it finds the nearest surface. A margin. A forearm. A knee bouncing under a desk. None of that was me failing to pay attention. It was attention, fully present, doing the thing it does when nobody’s given it a job.
It didn’t stop at the pen, either. Ask anyone who’s watched me drift mid-conversation — not out of boredom, but because the current needed somewhere to go and the conversation in front of me wasn’t fast enough to carry all of it. Or ask anyone who’s sat through me talking for ten minutes straight down a tangent nobody asked for. Same current. Different exit. The ideas had to go somewhere.
That’s the part I think we get backwards, not just about ADHD brains but about attention generally. You don’t hold anyone’s attention by demanding stillness — a room, a classroom, a scrolling feed, doesn’t matter. You hold it by giving the restless part somewhere to land. The kid doodling in the third row isn’t checked out. If anything, they’re the clearest model of how attention actually behaves once it’s engaged: it needs a channel, and the moment it has one, the rest of it stays in the room.
The tattoos, looking back, were never really a new impulse. They’re the same one from the margins of my school books — just aimed somewhere permanent instead of somewhere erasable. Nobody warned that kid off the pen for the right reason. The pen wasn’t the problem. It was the only place that attention had been offered to go.
Attention was never missing. The ideas just had to go somewhere.
