Sami Grisafe was an 18-year-old Californian when she stood at the Buckingham Fountain and said goodbye to her parents, embarking on what would become a 15-year Chicago adventure.
At first coming to study at the Chicago College of Performing Arts, her odyssey included a championship-winning career in women’s tackle football and newfound family and roots in the city’s LGBTQ+ community that included singing the national anthem at the signing of Illinois’ marriage equality law.
Grisafe says she took “the pieces Chicago gave me” and combined them into a permanent tribute to the city: a tattoo that centers around the place where it all started — the Buckingham Fountain.
“That was kind of like the gateway into my adulthood,” she says.
The tattoo, done in 2017 by artist Adam Parrot, features the fountain, with streams of water descending from the top. But, rather than have a massive water spout shoot into the sky, a red flame emerges. That's a symbol of the Chicago Force, the now-defunct women’s tackle football team.
In high school in California, Grisafe was the first female quarterback on a boys high school varsity football team. When she moved to Chicago for college, she found out about the Force and set aside her acting aspirations to focus on the game she had fallen in love with.
She quarterbacked the team to the 2013 Women's Football Alliance national championship.
Playing for the Force, she says her teammates and coaches became her second family.
“It was pretty magical, having this group of people that otherwise wouldn’t have crossed paths in life, working toward a common goal, and that’s what really made it special — the love of the game and coming together to both enjoy in it and achieve in it,” Grisafe says.
The team shut down in 2017. By then, Grisafe was pursuing a singing career in Los Angeles, flying back to Chicago on weekends for the team’s final season.
“I just don’t think that there’s anything better to be in Chicago than a professional athlete," Grisafe says. "It’s just such a beautiful town that really rallies around its sports.”
Beneath the fountain in Grisafe’s tattoo is the phrase “HOKA HEY" — from the Native American Lakotas, something "one of our coaches who was Lakota would say" as he would put eye black on players' faces before games, Grisafe says: “It means it’s a good day to die, which means that you leave it all out there, you don’t fear death because you live every day so fully.”
Grisafe moved back to Los Angeles to be near her family, pursue her passion for music and work in technology.
But she carries Chicago around forever on her forearm, where four Chicago stars complete the tattoo.
“I’m really grateful to the city for everything it gave me," Grisafe says. "And it still lives within me."
