Lindsay Peace takes her children with her wherever she goes. The Canadian mother has portraits of all three of her children tattooed on her arms.
Created by her husband, Steve Peace, a tattoo artist from Calgary, the ink depicted two boys and a girl with pigtails wearing a pink dress with a big purple bow. When the couple's son, Ace, came out as transgender this past summer, he asked his mother to erase the tattoo to remove the depiction that didn't reflect his true identity.
"People would say, 'Oh, who is on your arm?'" Lindsay Peace told the Calgary Metro. "We were on holidays, and people would say, 'Is that your kids?' And here I am with three boys, and very clearly a little girl was on my arm. We'd say it's the neighbor."
When Peace needed to touch up the tattoos, she knew it was time to do more than refresh the dulled colors. The bow became a slingshot, the pink dress morphed into a blue t-shirt with grey shorts, and the dreaded pigtails were blended into the background. Slowly but surely, as he did in real life, Ace emerged from the girl everyone mistakenly thought that he was.
"It was just an easy fix," Steve Peace said. "It's a different world these days. We're just lucky to live where we do. I think it'd be tough if we lived in a different country, or even the States."
He told the newspaper he and his wife have always been supportive of Ace's transformation.
"We weren't surprised," he said. "As parents, you say, 'Whatever makes you happy,' and we've seen him become happier and happier as time goes on, which makes us happy. Parents need to really support their kids in these situations. I thought he was happy before, but no -- he's happier now. It's crazy. He smiles all the time."
Check out Lindsay Peace's updated ink in the Facebook post below, and scroll down to watch a video report on the Peace family and their very visible trans pride, from Canada's Global News network.