I woke up yesterday really excited as I was getting a new tattoo and this one was my first full colour. Naturally, in the morning I had to go to work, but luckily for me, I had to wake up at 7 a.m. instead of the usual 5:15, so I was a bit more rested than usual.
This new tattoo I was getting is part of our ‘family oriented tattoos’ and I thought to myself that I had chosen the area well, considering that I found it bearable to get my ribs inked. Was I wrong…
As stated in a previous post, we always get our tattoos done at Radical Ink, and I’m not going to give you anymore details about the place as you can find all the info about our personal experiences there in D‘s post. Like I always do when in Romania, I get my tattoos done by the talented (and very patient – patience was needed yesterday) tattoo artist, Andrei Chirita. Check him out here!
I got there with a pretty clear idea in my head about what I wanted to get, D‘s fingerprint. And not any fingerprint, his ring finger. I knew it was going to be hard to do that in a watercolour style, but Andrei did a marvellous job at integrating the fingerprint into a watercolour tattoo. He found some wonderful Magnolia flowers sketched online and we decided they were perfect. I was very happy that we could integrate my ‘three’ obsession into this tattoo, because I really wanted that desperately.
Now, moving on to the concept behind the tattoo. As stated earlier, it’s D‘s fingerprint and basically three fully bloomed Magnolias. The idea behind the three-concept is that right now there’s three of us in our family (D, our dog – maybe I should do a post on her – and myself) and we will celebrate three years of marriage this year. The beautiful way that Andrei placed the fingerprint under two of the flowers, symbolises the fact that he (D) touches me and our dog profoundly. The freed Magnolia, which is placed higher than the other two symbolises himself as being the head of our small family. I guess that whole meaning behind the tattoo helped me go through it until the end, and it’s not yet done, but we have to wait for it to heal before we do any more work on it.
About the pain… I honestly thought that if I went through a quite big tattoo on my ribs, without any real issues, than this one should be relaxing. I was so, so wrong! This one has to be the most painful one I’ve ever gotten so far. Mainly I think that’s due to the fact that it’s a colour tattoo and the technique is quite different than for black and white. With colour, you have to go over and over the same area numerous times and on top of it all, the coloured ink stings like hell. Literally, at some point, I couldn’t bare anyone touching my skin. The worst part of the lower arm had to be the exact middle, as it hurt a lot less when he was getting close to either my elbow or my wrist (which is totally unnatural).
During the last hour of the session, Andrei had to actually trick me into getting more ink. I don’t know exactly how he did it, but he did and we managed to get 90% of the tattoo done. The fact that he got so far proves just what a good tattoo artist he is. I mean, he really had his work cut out with me because at some point I was moving uncontrollably on the chair, but he still managed to not get any line out of place. After about two hours, my arm doubled in size, but that’s just a normal reaction of the skin, which made it even more painful. Honestly, had I known how painful the whole are would be, I probably would’ve chosen my back for this tattoo. Do not get me wrong! Right now, looking at my arm, while writing this post, I regret nothing and I am quite proud of the fact that I managed to go through this. I just hope and pray that it will heal perfectly and that all we’ll have to do next time (in about a month) is finish all the accents that I couldn’t resist for last night.
I know that the care process is going to be extremely important and it will make the difference throughout the years. Most people use Bepanthen to care for their new ink (because it’s cheap), and I’ve done that for my first three tattoos, but ever since I discovered Sorry Mom tattoo balm (I first used it on my ribs), I will not care for them with anything else. The difference is that big! True it is a bit more expensive, but you’ll have a beautiful tattoo for life, so in my opinion it’s worth every penny.
If you’re wondering why we keep tattooing bits of each other or other things that might change throughout our lives, just remember that if there’s one thing you can’t change in life, that’s the past and we both consider our skin to be our life diary! That’s where we were at that point in our life and there’s nothing that could change that and our tattoos are a reminder of that. This is basically our motto when getting new ink and this is how we always make sure that we will not regret any of the tattoos we have on our body!
I will stop writing now as it’s not very comfortable (another thing I didn’t take into consideration when I chose my right arm, especially since I can’t do anything with my left) and probably next week we’ll post a lot less text that you’re used to, but I hope we’ll still manage to post daily or almost daily.
I hope you enjoyed my tattoo-story and soon we promise we’ll do a few posts on all our tattoos as they all have stories behind them.
L.
P.S: Before you even go there…WE WILL LOOK FABULOUS WITH ALL OUR TATTOOS WHEN WE’LL BE 80! 😉
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