Spanish woman fights Army rejection over tattoo
■ Army says tattoo on foot would be visible in skirt
Madrid, July 10: When Estela Martín got a black lotus flower tattooed on the upper part of her right foot at the age of 18, her parents were unhappy about it, but she saw it as a positive symbol, BBC reported on Tuesday.
“I’ve always liked the idea that the lotus represents, which is that you have to fight for what you want,” she says.
But 12 years later, that same tattoo has left her fighting to save her ambition of a career in the Spanish military.
In June, Ms Martín took part in a civil service exam to become a military psychologist. She had left her previous job, in a Madrid hospital, two years earlier in order to study and prepare herself for the highly competitive selection process.
But when she was taking part in a swimming test that was part of the exam, an examiner saw the tattoo on her foot and told her she could not continue because it could be visible when worn with a skirt.
Ms Martin understood that the rules no longer obliged women to wear skirts and, given that that the tattoo was not visible when she wore trousers, she argued that it was within the regulations. However, she says the examiner insisted that she could be ordered to wear a skirt and refused to change his mind. “I felt terrible, at first I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “The reasons he was giving me seemed so absurd. I left utterly distraught, I was crying.”
She says there were several men taking the same swimming exam who had body art, including one who had a tattoo on his heel, but none of them were pulled out.