How to be an Awesome Dad 101: Shave your head and get a tattoo to match your son’s cancer scar. It’s thoughtful, sensitive, kind, and definitely beats stacking Cheerios on your kid’s face while she’s asleep.
When Josh Marshall’s son Gabriel was diagnosed with a rare malignant brain tumor called anaplastic astrocytoma in March 2015, he knew exactly what he had to do.
“Got my son’s scar tattooed to help his self confidence,” Marshall wrote alongside his entry photo into St. Baldrick’s Foundation’s #BestBaldDad competition, which takes submissions from fathers, grandfathers, and uncles who have shaved their heads to honor a child they know who has cancer. As he told Buzzfeed, his son said he felt like a monster after the surgery to remove the tumor left him with a large scar along the left side of his head.
“This broke my heart,” he said. “I told him if people wanted to stare, they could stare at both of us.”
[Could someone please open a window? It’s dusty in here…]
In the end, Marshall’s photo won the #BestBaldDad competition. As St. Baldricks’ social media manager Alison Sutton told BuzzFeed, the entry stood out because it was “the first time we’ve seen an entry where a dad went above and beyond shaving his head in solidarity with his child and got a tattoo to build his son’s self-confidence. It’s a truly touching story.”
Marshall is overwhelmed with the support he’s gotten since winning. In a Facebook post, he called the title “an honor,” saying, “The truth is I’m no better then any of the other contestants. We are all great fathers that would go to any extent to help our children, so in my eyes we’re all winners!”
As for Gabe, he’s stable these days. His most recent scans show that some of the tumor is still remaining in his brain, but he’s been off treatment for the past nine months. And he loves his dad’s tattoo — he says it makes them “twins.”
