My First Tattoo

As you may have read here, my family and friends in the CAPEX community honored me last month by giving me a tattoo in recognition of my decade of service and personal growth.  I am still just blown away that they did this for me.  It's such an honor! 

Ma’am was in charge of making the arrangements to get my ink done… but then we had to reschedule it twice already.  Ma’am wanted to have the person who did her wife’s tattoo do mine, and CF (my wife-in-law) wanted to be there w/ us when I got mine done – which meant a trip down to Atlanta.  We were going to do it last Monday, but that was right before CF’s surgery, and so it wasn’t a great time.  So we rescheduled for next Monday… but that was right before Ma’m and I go to the beach and Atlanta is in the opposite direction, so we realized that to do it then was going to add a lot of extra drive time.  In addition, I learned that the artist who did CF’s tattoo (while her tattoo looks awesome!) apparently he doesn’t work in color, and I wanted my hound to be green, which is my favorite color and it matches my pretty, green eyes.  So we did an online search, and checked out Facebook, and we found a place we liked only 20 minutes away, and decided to go ahead and go up there and get the work done.

My artist’s name was Eric, and Kitten and I both really liked him.  He was humorous, friendly w/o being chatty, open-minded & intelligent (when Ma’am told him she had a husband and a wife, he responded, “I think polyamoury is wrong; I don’t think you should mix your Greek and Latin word roots!”  LOL), a Wiccan, a comic book collector, and a gammer geek.  So we had plenty to chat about while he worked.

This was my first tattoo.  It hurt.  I’m a very skinny puppy (6’3” and 160 lbs.), so I don’t have much padding, and that meant he was tattooing right over bone.  On top of that, he was also tattooing over a bruise still left from a Saint Bernard bight from last weekend (Thank you ever so much for that, Sir), and that added an extra bit of ouch to the experience.  (Even from 250 miles away, Loki can still hurt me…)

In addition to being a cool guy, Eric also proved to be a very skilled tattoo artist.  We were so pleased w/ the work he did on me (My hound looks awesome!!!) that after he finished we decided to ask him to do some touch-up work on Kitten’s second tattoo (which was okay… but not fully realized).  He spent an hour working over her tattoo and it now looks much better.  (I think she’s putting before-and-after pics on Fet.)  Ma’am has already made up her mind that she wants Eric to do her next tattoo (the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland in the center of her back).

One other note:  The Kitten got her first I-phone a few days ago, and while I was getting my tattoo done her text alert went off several times.  Then while she was getting her touch-ups done the text alert started going off every couple of minutes.  When she got out of the chair and looked at it, she had 30 messages in an hour!  This is why I’m a ludite… b/c if my friends sent me 30 messages in an hour I’d have to disown the lot of them.  I think it’s not technology in general I’m against so much as all this social networking stuff.  I am simply too much of an introvert to ever want to feel that connected! LOL.

That being said, however, this amazing tattoo makes me feel connected to my community in a very meaningful way.  Thank you, again, to everybody who thought me worthy of this reward.  I think of you every time I look in the mirror.  You guys rock!