I figured, since I’m all about updating my blog lately (I have now moved all of my old blog posts back to 2007 over here ~ still working on the first Japan trip though.), I thought I should give the current tattoo situation too. Last time I wrote about my tattoos, I had 5. Now I have 8 and it feels right in my brain. (Sitting at 4 for so long was difficult for me!)

I’ve mentioned before my friends I met through my Twilight adventures and how I subsequently ended up life-bonding with them through text messaging apps. The four of us from the first incarnation of the messaging group discussed the idea of getting matching tattoos. Many ideas were thrown back and forth and the original plan to do it in Forks the first time didn’t pan out. We finally worked out a vague design and a time frame to get them done in San Diego after meeting up in LA and before roadtripping down to Phoenix to meet up with more of the group (June 2014). We decided on stars, one for each of us with our favourite colour. I drew up it up and we went with it.

In hindsight, things would probably be different. There were 5 of us travelling together that time (5 of us got tattoos together, 4 of them matched. ) and we also ended up essentially excluding the rest of the group in our plans. Not cool. But karma took care of that oversight for me. It got REALLY infected and didn’t heal well. It looks kind of awful now.

Done by Jerry at Body Graphics Tattoo & Piercing in Temecula, CA – it looked good right after it was done! 😦 Too bad. (It’s on my inner right ankle, BTW.)

This actually doesn’t show how bad it really was. The redness around the stars is subtle in this picture. And the colour is missing in spots now. I guess I had a bad reaction to the ink or something.

I got tattoo #7 at the same time. Just a lone black star on the other ankle. It was originally supposed to be white and in a different place, but… these things happen sometime when you butt heads with the tattoo guy. (My advice is if you aren’t 100% happy with the feedback, wait. I was too set on getting the tattoo that very minute so I compromised when I shouldn’t have. Lesson learned.) It was supposed to be like the Converse star… It ended up nothing like it. Another lesson: inspect the stencil on your skin and then the outline again to make sure you are good with the design and placement before they fill it in. I asked for a ‘perfect’ star. What I got was… not. The other tattoo with the 4 stars were whimsical and oddly shaped on purpose. I didn’t make myself clear that this one wasn’t supposed to be the same thing. As it turns out, this is my only tattoo of the 8 that I don’t like. I definitely plan to get it touched up someday.

I’m not happy at all with this one. The points are all different sizes and it got infected too so there are blotches of ink missing.

my friend wanted to get a similar one, but her favourite colour is purple

Fast forward over a year later to this past August. Wait, no. Back up. Set it up a bit~

I spend a LOT of time on Pinterest. I actually have 2 boards dedicated to tattoos. One is inspiration for my own and the other, combined with piercing, is of people who just look badass with all their ink. The inspiration pictures was one of the very first boards I made when I signed up. One of the earliest pictures I added to it was a semicolon in the midst of a cluster of scars on someone’s wrist. The message was simple. “The option to stop but the choice to continue.” That totally struck a chord with me. It has been on my want list since then.  (It’s also included in my “tattoo plans” drawing that I included in my 100happydays.)

Back to the more recent past, my friend had just lost someone to suicide and wanted to get the semicolon too. We decided that, even though both of us are not fans of getting ‘trend tattoos’, we both strongly believe in this movement and made plans to get them done together. As usual with my tattoo experiences, it was a bit of an adventure, but we ended up at Exquizeet Tattoo & Piercing Studio (which is out of the local tattoo school) with Marian as our artist. I was so impressed with her attention to detail. I’ll be going back to her in the future for more (despite the higher prices they have).

Ignore the awkward pose I made us do ( ??) and just appreciate the cuteness of punctuation – the second layer of meaning to it, for me.

Marian had done a few semicolon tattoos lately. She said the more she looked at it, the more she liked it and asked if she could take a picture of mine for her Instagram.

This is what I posted on Facebook afterwards:

Got mine today.
At first, I was put off by the fact that sooooo many people now have this tattoo but it’s something that SHOULD be shared. It is a movement towards being more vocal about suicide and that’s something important to a lot of people, myself included.
Thanks to my friend for doing this with me. That made it that much more significant. You’ve always accepted me for exactly who I am and even liked because because of all my oddities rather than in spite of them. And I love you for exactly who you are.