A 23-year-old Canberra uni student who struggles to tell left from right went ‘fuck it’ and got the directions tattooed on her hands. We stan a practical queen.
D’Kodia Laine had a tiny little ‘L’ tattooed on her left hand, and an ‘R’ tattooed on her right.
She told the Daily Mail it was inspired by a uni scavenger hunt where she was the designated navigator. After telling the driver to take a few wrong turns, a mate drew an ‘L’ and an ‘R’ on her hands.
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“It started as a joke but it’s actually super useful and I don’t look dumb making an L with my fingers to figure it out,” Laine told the publication.
She tapped Sydney tattoo queen Lauren Winzer to ink the letters, which is probably why they look so damn cute.
“Not only are tattoos cute, but they can also be super functional!” Lauren said on Instagram.
“Good luck with all ur future directions happy to help guide you.”
If you’re reading this thinking ‘ooh, good idea, might also get some tattoos’, then you’re not alone. Not being able to tell left from right is a common problem, with anywhere from 9% to one third of the population reporting issues (depending on which study you draw from). It’s also considered to be more common in women than men.
As to exactly why some people struggle with their lefts and rights, it’s a bit more complex. For some, it seems to be damage in a section of the brain’s parietal lobe called angular gyrus. For others, it’s associated with dyslexia or dyspraxia. Distractions like loud noises or ‘mirroring’ (for example in hospitals, where a patient’s left might be a nurse’s right) can make it worse.
Giving your scavenger team the wrong directions aside, a poor ‘left-right discrimination’ (as it’s technically called) is usually pretty harmless – unless you work in the medical profession.
Some of the most disastrous medical errors in modern history have been due to the simple human error of medical professionals mixing up their lefts and rights, such as when two doctors at a hospital in the UK took out a patient’s left kidney instead of the right, and the patient died.
Anyway! If this is you, perhaps consider getting hand tattoos. Or not. You’re a grown adult, I can’t tell you what to do.
