Tattoo. The 2nd stage has landed.

So, yesterday I hit my target weight on my diet, which means that I now have to figure out how to eat in order to neither lose nor gain any weight.  That will be interesting.  I may stay on the diet but start exercising, in an attempt to replace fat with (heavier) muscle.

In a total coincidence, but a nice one as it makes this a reward for achievement, yesterday was also the day when I got my long-planned vine-scroll tattoo done.  This was a much bigger job than the cross and took two solid hours of work.  (By which I mean the tattoo artist worked solidly for two hours, while I read “On Stranger Tides.”)

Again, it was not terribly painful – at times I was so absorbed in the book that I forgot it was happening at all.  The last half an hour, where he was going over lines he’d already made in order to widen them and do a bit of shading, did begin to shade into “I wonder how much longer I’m going to be able to stand this without needing to ask him to stop” territory, though.  It had got to the stage where the skin already felt badly sunburnt, so the hot scratchy feeling of the needles was magnified by everything already being inflamed and oversensitive.

I did ask him why I – with my low pain threshold – was finding this easy, while people I know with much higher ones have found it terrible, and he said, darkly, that “there are a lot of butchers out there.”  Which I take to mean that a lot of it is down to the skill of the tattoo artist rather than my innate toughness.

This was a different artist this time – Barry himself, the boss of the place.  I was very impressed by the way he took the line drawing he’d made and improved on it with a bit of freehand shading.  He seemed surprised that I didn’t want any more doing with it.  He said “I could do so much with this!  Fill it in with colour or greywork to make it look like a piece of jewellery.”  But I don’t know that I want any more than this.  I’m fairly certain I don’t, in fact.  I like the bold, black tribal tattoos, and I wanted it to be a bit like that, only with iconography from my own culture (assuming there’s some Angle or Saxon blood in me somewhere.)  It’s pretty much exactly what I wanted as it is: