Anniversary Tattoo

I'm so glad Shannon wrote her blog entry below so that it's finally my turn to post.

Look what I got yesterday!

(Picture removed due to student creepers) :)

Yesterday was my and Clint's 15th anniversary.  To commemorate the event, we thought it would be fun to get each other's initials tattooed on ourselves.  The problem?  Clint already has my name tattooed on his forearm.

So tattooing my initials on there would be pretty redundant.

Thus, my super corny cliche romantic vision of getting each other's initials carved into our skin turned into just me getting his initials.  Here we were supposed to be side-by-side in our tattoo chairs, suffering together, but instead it was just ME suffering.

I told Clint I didn't want his initials floating around in space, so he helped me to pick out a simple little peacock design from google images to compliment some initials (yes, my tattoo is from google).  I decided I wanted it on my hip.

As it turns out, the hip is an awesome place to get a tattoo.  Compared to the cherry blossom branch on my ankle/foot, the pain for this one was much more manageable.  The first five minutes, as usual, was the worst, because your body has to adjust to being assaulted with a needle without being able to move around, tense, or squirm.  That's the hardest part.  HOLDING STILL, when all you want to do is flail out and kick the tattoo artist in the face.  But after you get past the first five or ten minutes, your brain starts to come up with coping strategies for holding still and dealing with the pain.  You pick speckles on the ceiling to count, or a picture on the wall to zone in on.  The thing that works the best for me is to picture muscles in my body--ones that are far away from the needle--turning into water.  I don't know why that works, but it's become my magical formula for getting through these things.  Somehow it takes the focus away from the needle.  It still hurts like hell, but I can manage it.  But what was awesome was that for this little hip tattoo, I only had to use my coping strategies for about the first 45 minutes.  After that, I no longer cared about the needle at all, and at one particular moment toward the end I even felt a little bored and was thinking about what I was going to eat for lunch.  That's how I know the hip area is a much less painful area to get a tattoo.  There was NO WAY I could think about lunch for the cherry blossom branch.

Here's a little more close-up of right after it was done:

(This picture removed too)

And here it is today, without all the red:

If you look on the bottom left of the tail, you can see the initials "CP."