She Got 106 Shark Tattoos And A Guinness World Record
Emily Morrison was eight years old when the movie Jaws scared her away from the ocean. Her father's response was to take her to the library and tell her to find a real reason to hate sharks. She did not find one. What she found instead was 450 million years of evolutionary history, extraordinary biological adaptations, and a gap in public understanding that she decided she wanted to spend her life filling. She became a shark biologist. She started a shark adventure tour company off the coast of Venice, Florida, called Shark Lady Enterprises. And starting in 1999, at age 19, with a great white tattooed onto her lower back as a tribute to the very shark from Jaws that started it all, she began tattooing a new shark onto her skin every time she encountered a different species in the wild. As of this year, Emily has 106 shark tattoos covering her body from foot to neck, representing 71 different species, 13 fossilized shark teeth, and one fresh shark tooth, earning her the Guinness World Records title for the most sharks tattooed on the body by a female.
Each tattoo is a record of a real encounter. She has fed tiger sharks and great hammerheads in the Bahamas. She has cage dived with great whites in Australia. She has swum with whale sharks off the coast of Mexico. Her favorite tattoos are the colored ones covering her legs, and her goal is to have all 58 shark families represented on her body before she is finished, with seven families still to go. She told Guinness that if you have a passion, you should try to turn it into a career, and that if you do, you will always be happy. Emily is living proof of that equation. She spends most of her life on or near the water now, running fossil dive charters that take visitors searching for megalodon teeth on the seafloor, and this week she appears on Discovery Channel's Shark Week in a show called My Strange Shark Addiction, where she shares the story behind the ink and the animals that inspired it. Her skin tells 27 years of shark encounters. She is nowhere near finished.
