Sports Fanatics With Premature Championship Tattoos Are Totally Normal

We’ve all done it before — gotten so excited about an event or a milestone before it even happened and couldn’t stop the desire to celebrate prematurely. Dreams of what’s inside that big Christmas present, fantasies about that passionate kiss on a yet-to-happen first date, or for sports fans nearly every year, imagining the triumph of your favorite team.

Except that some just can’t stop at the daydreaming stage — instead, they go and get a premature championship tattoo.

With tattoos becoming more the norm in the past decade or so, and with the proliferation of visual stimuli in our lives, there’s little wonder that this phenomenon is quickly becoming regular news around the time of big sports events. Just ask Jordan Garnett, who anointed his Dallas Cowboys team as the 2017 champions before they ended up losing the Super Bowl. Now that March Madness is in our faces, it’s likely that some college basketball fan is already consulting with his local ink parlor (and/or fortune teller) for similar treatment.

Why put a prediction on your skin, particularly when you have no amount of control over the outcome of the contest? At first pass, this probably seems pretty dumb. But it turns out, this urge to paint the future in permanent ink stems from some real and fairly normal elements of human psychology, or so says a March 22 article in Psychology Today.

The urge to predict wildly and then brag about it apparently stems from four specific psychological patterns: claiming identity, magical thinking, an honest signal of commitment and confidence, and status gains.

Claiming identity refers to the many ways we try to signal who we are as individuals, like bumper stickers, T-shirts, and yes, tattoos. Magical thinking, meanwhile, refers to the superstitious behaviors displayed by many of us — particularly athletes. But, as the article details, the big difference between a predictive tattoo and an athlete wearing, say, a lucky shirt before the big game is that “the athlete actually has some control over the outcome.” When it comes to displaying commitment and confidence, a predictive tattoo is probably as committed and confident as one can get. And as far as status gains, the fact that such a boastful prediction about the future — a predictive tattoo — can be seen by possibly hundreds of people or more definitely garners these die-hard fans some major attention.

That said, there are often real consequences to committing your magical thinking to ink. One Cardinals fan, whom others believed actually jinxed their team in the 2016 season, received a few death threats. And some — though not all — people regret getting a tattoo, even one they had much more rational reasons for setting in ink.

So, the next time you see some guy (yes, it’s usually a guy) showing off his tea leaves in the form of a championship tattoo, don’t judge him too harshly. And maybe we should all just encourage these sports fans to do what one did and just leave a few key sections empty so you can fill in the blank, just in case.

Read more from Yahoo Style + Beauty:

• Khloé Gets Her ‘Tramp Stamp’ Removed – and Documents It

• Amber Rose Just Got the Craziest New Tattoo

• 12 Celebrity Tattoos That Made a Rare Appearance at the Grammys

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