My Tattoos
This is the first tattoo I got. It's the size of a thumbnail and it sits on my right shoulder blade. Getting this tattoo was one of those things you always wanted to do in your life. It took me a year to get the design right and to find a studio in my area.
After I had it I thought that was it for the topic of tattoos. But even as I left the tattoo studio the tattoo artist said something like "You'll be back. Once you have one, you'll get others." I just thought "Not me, dude. This is it for me." And for about six years I was right.
Then one year on vacation in Florida I kept stumbling across tattoo parlours everywhere I went. It was like a sign. Then I met a girl in the youth hostel who wanted to get a tattoo too and liked the idea of the motif I had had in the meantime. So we went together and I got my second tattoo in Miami Beach.
It's a scorpion (like me, scorpio) and it's on my hip bone. After the first few strokes I realized: big mistake,
too close to the bone. But it was too late to stop so I went through with it. You can hardly tell the tattoo artist after the first minute "Sorry, I changed my mind, can you make this
into a nice little ladybug?"
The next tattoo came three years later, this time something very different. I didn't like the thick black lines any more and had seen an article in a tattoo magazine about a woman who did white tattoos that looked like lace. When I went to the tattoo parlour near my friend's house, they told me that they can't guarantee that white will show at all or stay if it does show at first. So we decided on lavender as color. It's a flying unicorn on my ancle (big mistake again, but you seem to forget pain rather fast) and it doesn't come out when you scan it, so there's no picture.
It only took my two years before I got this one. It's a chinese dragon of 7 cm by 3 cm (or 2 3/4 inches by 1 inch) on my forearm close to the ellbow. I guess this is a kind of statement because it's a place where everyone can see it, at least in summer. And I catch a lot of people staring at it, which is fun. Some even make out what it is at the first glimpse. And some of them come up and say "Hey, I like your tattoo."
If you want to know which country my dragon comes from and find out more about Eastern and other dragons, check out this page.
In the meantime I tried someting else: piercing. I had my belly button pierced half a year after I got the dragon. That was interesting. Let'see if it's as addicting as tattos.
I got my latest tattoo on Feb. 2nd 2000. (Conincidentally that's the same date that I got the dragon in 96.) It's a floral design band round my right upper arm. I don't have a scan of it yet, but here is the design I drew for it:
This is certainly not the last tattoo I will have gotten. I'm still thinking about something celtic. It might get big so I have to save some money first. But it will happen sometime ...
In the meantime I explored piercing a bit further and had my nose 'done'. I've thought about it for a long time and although I knew it would hurt (I had a purist piercing artist: no anaesthesia whatsoever!) I went and did it on January 2, 2004.
On August 16, 2007 I got a new tattoo. It finally worked out. I got stuck with my celtic motiv and fell in love with Maori motifs when I was in New Zealand. So now it's a Maori shoulder. On the left side, shoulder and upper arm, so far the biggest one. I had it done a day before I went on vacation to England. Not the best idea in case of complications but it was the only appointment I could get. And there were no complications anyway (never have been). The basic design of the outline was taken from a pattern with some changes by me. The shading is my work as well. I incorporated the shape of a greenstone pendant that I made when I was in NZ. It's a Hei Matau (fishhook) in the upper part of the tattoo.