Tattoos used to be the mark of someone who was out of the mainstream and kind of hard-living ... but these days, tattoos are as common on sweet, gentle PTA moms as they once were on sailors and wild women. Lots of moms get tattoos to celebrate their children or mark milestones in an important personal journey.

That's what happened with Susan, who battled 13 years of infertility, spent thousands on surgeries and fertilization procedures, and worst of all, had two miscarriages. In fact, she was never able to carry a baby to term. But something beautiful came out of her sad story.

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She was looking on an Internet message board when she found a design that struck her heart: it depicted a broken outline of a heart with two tiny footprints inside. It represented how she felt about ending the quest to become pregnant and marked the memory of the babies she lost. "I felt like I needed to get this tattoo to truly mark the end of the journey, and put a stamp on it that we were here," she says. "They will always be in my heart even though I'm broken a little because they're not here."

As she points out, she didn't have any physical reminders of her babies ... no pictures, no ultrasound images, nothing to hold on to. So this tattoo was a way of marking their memory she could always carry with her.

Her story has a happy ending, though. Some years after they stopped their attempts to conceive, she and her husband were asked to adopt a baby boy. He's now a gorgeous, happy toddler and Susan lights up when she's with him.

Do you have any tattoos? What do they represent?

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