Get a tattoo

made a deposit on an appointment for august 26th. woohoo! i might actually decide to get a very small piece done before then, because the area i’m getting mine (down my right side, over my ribs) is supposed to be painful and i want to know what i’m letting myself in for.

i’m excited!

i went in for my consultation yesterday, walking two and a half miles through the philly heat on a stomach full of spicy indian food. as i was talking to the artist at the counter, my vision went all swimmy and i nearly passed out! augh, it was mortifying.

the upshot is, she wants me to have a more clear-cut idea of the specific design i want (not just a scarily thorough knowledge of the mythological importance of the oak tree), and to come back in sometime to discuss it again. and, since i was fainting for no apparent reason, she was really nice to me, even though i was clueless and unprepared. :-)

even so, she did spend about ten minutes talking to me, and said at the end that she thought she had an idea what i wanted. the current plan is to make an appointment for some time in the future, and meet once before then to go over the design again. and now i have drawings!

after talking about the oak tattoo, i’ve decided to get it done fairly small, in a way that i could add to it later if i wanted (ie half a branch)

i have an appointment for a consultation with jackie brown at the no ka oi tiki tattoo studio in philadelphia tomorrow!

ive considered getting an oak branch as a tattoo. oaks are one of those fascinating things that are pretty much a universal – useless for things like historical linguistics, because they’re untraceable since every culture has a word for them. it’s a little like getting “om” tattooed on you, but less cheesy and more pretty. i think ;-)

the text i want to get, “all this glory” (and maybe the second half, ”...unto ashes must”) come from a sonnet about mortality, and its tendency to creep up on us puny hunams. it was the name of my radio show, the name of my (underused) blog, and my favorite phrase all around.

today at work i was going through the alumni offices files of deceased graduates. it’s amazing – so many boring housewives who had no interest in being active alums and lived into their 90s, and then this awesome woman who worked as a lawyer for underprivileged kids in NYC, and died at 41 of cancer. life’s not fair. all this glory &c.

i tried (feebly) to get a tattoo today. the place i want to go takes walk-ins on the weekends, and i showed up at around 3 to see if there was room. there was a tiny window of time at around 3:30 when i could have gone, but i wasn’t ready, and after that they were booked. oh well… at least now i have a proper design.

i stopped by new york adorned (2nd ave and 3rd st) to ask about pricing of text tattoos. they’re $180/hour – i made an effort to figure out what the approximate amount of skin i’d want to cover would be, and though it’s hard to be precise it looks like i’d be in the $180 area.

unfortunately, they only take walk-ins on the weekend, and the earliest appointment i could get would be in AUGUST. so my options are a) go elsewhere b) hope a visiting artist has time this week c) go in next weekend and hope there’s room or d) wait until august.

...all of these options assume, of course, that i’m settled on a text, which is untrue.