Chicago tattoos: Bike helped Adam Goldberg find solace during the pandemic, so he had it tattooed on his thigh

In the spring of 2020, Adam Goldberg says he was facing some mental health issues while battling isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

Goldberg’s parents had just cleaned out their garage and brought him a bike that had been in the family since the late 1980s.

“A free bike? Sure, I’ll take a bike,” Goldberg remembers thinking.

His mind flashed back to family rides growing up in Northbrook, bonding with his sister and parents as they rode matching Trek MultiTrack 720s. That “weird heirloom” soon became the escape he longed for — and an object with enough meaning to immortalize with a tattoo.

Goldberg, a data analyst who works in advertising technology, began fighting boredom and pandemic-induced loneliness by taking to Chicago bike paths. 

“It turned out to be just the thing,” Goldberg says. “It’s something I can count on all summer, way too far into the fall and probably way too early in the spring, something I can do where I need to separate from my desk, from my phone. I can just do that.”

He pedaled from his Bucktown apartment to Goose Island, Northerly Island, often along Lake Michigan. A wrong turn once landed him in Pilsen, a neighborhood he hadn’t explored since moving to the city after graduating from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

“I didn’t want to stop riding,” he says. “I didn’t want to stop pedaling.”

The rides became longer and longer. In the summer of 2020, Goldberg reached a goal he had set for himself — to ride from his apartment in Bucktown to the old family home in Northbrook about 22.5 miles away. 

Biking helped ease his mental struggle, he says. And his pandemic hobby would stand the test of the time.

Goldberg says he found solace in the family connection and also in the independence and freedom it gave him. He searched social media for a tattoo artist who could do the piece justice and settled on Chicago artist Colin O’Keefe.

“It brings me so much joy, and it’s kind of silly,” Goldberg says. “But, every time I go for a ride now, I’m riding my bike, and I look, and there’s my thigh tattoo, peeking out. It’s fun for me.”

Goldberg’s parents didn’t have the same positive reaction, though. Tattoos are forbidden in the Jewish faith, and Goldberg was the first in his family to have one. 

Goldberg also knew it would be hard for his parents to understand his getting a tattoo, given that tattoos were forced on Jews to identify them in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

But he says he got it anyway, in part as a way to gain independence from his family.

Which is pretty common, even when people don’t think through that that’s why they’re getting a tattoo, according to John Horgan, a Concordia University Wisconsin history professor who has a unit on tattoos’ meaning. 

“It’s a way of expressing control,” Horgan says, of saying: “ ‘I’m in charge, I have authority.’ ”

Goldberg hopes that, when he’s older, his tattoo will remind him of his youth.

“I think that when I’m 60 years old and when my legs are flabby and I’ve got this weird lopsided tattoo because my legs are flabby and old, I’ll look down and say, ‘Damn, that thing really was the mark of my 20s.’ ” Goldberg says. “And I’m so glad that I had that bike.”