A father of an 8-year-old boy battling brain cancer had a scar tattooed on his head after the boy said his own scars made him feel like a “monster.”
“This broke my heart,” Josh Marshall, 28, who lives in Kansas, told Buzzfeed. “I told him if people wanted to stare, they could stare at us both.”
Marshall’s son Gabriel was diagnosed with anaplastic astrocytoma, a rare malignant brain tumor, in March 2015, Buzzfeed reported. Marshall told the news site that his son is stable despite some of the tumor remaining in his brain. He’s been on and off treatment for about nine months.
Marshall entered a photo of the two with their matching scars into a #BestBaldDad contest hosted by St. Baldrick’s Foundation. The contest accepted photos from men who had shaved their heads in honor of a child battling cancer and received thousands of submissions.
The two won the competition, and the photo has since gone viral.