Get a tattoo

Yeah, baby. Fifteen years of waiting will be over and I will have my way with the appearance of my own darn flesh! Stuff I have to do…

• be sure to wear a bra so there’s something to tuck my shirt up into
• make a bank deposit so there’s money to pay for this on my debit card

I’m a little nervous, I admit.

I’m not 100% sure how well I’ll handle the pain. I’m not exactly a wimp, you understand. As a kid I essentially had the equivalent of a fracture to a facial bone – multiple times – and while I wanted to die every time, I never did. I had minor outpatient surgery once and the surgeon called my mom a few hours later to ask how I was (like he cared – I spent just enough time awake in the surgical center beforehand to learn that he was a complete jerk)...only to hear my mom say something like, “far as we know, she’s fine – she’s not here. She went to a dance…yeah, a dance...she’s 13 years old and had a date with a cute boy. Nothing was stopping her, including sutures.” (In case you were wondering why a 13-year-old scheduled a date a few hours after surgery…I didn’t. They sprang the operation on me. “Surprise, honey, the surgeon had an opening – let’s go!”)

Wow how I’m rambling today. Anyway I’m not exactly a wimp but I’m older than I was back then and I’m afraid I’m going to be drained after holding myself still for however long this is going to take. I guess it only matters so much; a friend is going to be there and he always insists on driving, so if nothing else I can demand to be driven to the ice cream house to get my blood sugar up and then go home and sleep off the nerves.

I also know that eventually my mother will see my tattoo and this will be one more occasion for her to tell me what she thinks of me and my crazy lifestyle (which, tat notwithstanding, basically consists of church, open mike nights, bookkeeping, and attempting to run a massage therapy practice). But you know, she did the same thing last time I told her I was feeling down – started tearing me apart. Not doing this wouldn’t save me from that. Besides, she had somewhere around two decades to dictate every waking moment of my life…now I get to decide how it’s gonna be.

Less than five days to go.

After wanting one for 15 years, March 26 at noon I finally get my ink.

My Marine buddy says he can come visit the week of the 20th and I knew he’d consider it an honor to be there for my first tattoo…and probably wouldn’t mind playing “nurse” and making sure I got the Vaseline on there thoroughly and regularly for the first couple of days afterward. LOL. Actually given that it’s going to be on my back I may need the help.

Finally the right person for the job! She said she had no problem doing my design at the size I wanted as long as I was open to a couple of very minor modifications, which she explained to me, and they were all acceptable to me. The price is well within my budget.

And, miracle of miracles, I liked her. Basically when I’m getting help on anything this intimate or powerful I have to like the person I’m dealing with, and they actually have to be a little bit like me. Even though I’m female, I have a lot of very masculine energy, and that means I either need a man or a woman with a strong animus. She has a very strong animus – she’s pleasant and welcoming enough to establish a bit of rapport and she wants to take care of you but she’s no-frills about it; she’s also very grounded, straightforward, in the moment, and focused on getting a good job done. No weirdness, drama, fluff, or funny looks.

So now I’m going to see when my Marine buddy can come into town next and see if he’s interested in going with me, then I’ll schedule.

Due to stuff I don’t really want to get into, I haven’t felt up to considering enlarging my tattoo size so I’ve left that topic alone this week, but I made an appointment to talk to the artist who I was referred to who’s talented at doing smaller-scale pieces. I’ll be seeing her Monday. We’ll see what she says about this.

This one seems much more down-to-earth and up-front. He said that he himself would not be comfortable doing it at the size I have in mind either, but he referred me to another artist who does especially well with small tattoos if I am absolutely sure I do not want to go any larger.

Coming from him, the size issue seems more believable, and actually I’d rather do a slightly larger-scale tattoo with someone who’s obviously qualified and interested in doing it rather than being too rigid in the matter of size.

My health issues have kicked in badly over the last few days and I really am not in a mental state to be making major decisions but when I feel a little better I’m going to print up a larger version of the tattoo on my “tattoo test drive” paper and see how I like it, and I’ll probably talk to the other artist as well for her input.

She tells me that she wouldn’t do the design I want at the size I want and anybody who did it wouldn’t be doing me any favors; it wouldn’t be detailed enough and would get really fuzzy in a few years. (It’s a logical line of reasoning but I’m not sure I believe it given how many fairly small tattoos I’ve seen with just as much detail or more.) But she’d be happy to do it at twice the size I had planned. Um, I want a tattoo, not a billboard, honey. She may have a nice portfolio but I didn’t like anything else about her. Frankly at best she came off as talented but ditzy, and at worst as talented but trying to upsell me.

Honestly this on the whole was the most messed-up day I’ve had in a while so I went into kind of a slump when I realized I’d waited two weeks to talk for less than five minutes to someone who I really wouldn’t want touching me, much less tattooing me, but after a while I just told myself, “come on, you don’t have time to waste feeling like garbage. You’ve already done that way too many hours of your life. Now go find the contact info for another tattoo artist whose profile you liked – there were at least three really promising candidates, so choose one and give him a call right now and set up a consultation. Let’s see what he has to say about all this.”

At the very least she’s in incredibly high demand. I set up a consultation for next weekend.

I’m going to call the studio tomorrow and see when I can stop in, talk to her, and show her the design I have in mind.