The Tattooed Lady

So as you might have noticed in this post, or if you follow me on twitter, I got my first tattoo done a few weeks ago. I was waiting until it had fully healed to post some proper pictures of it, but it turns out it's REALLY HARD to photograph the inside of your wrist, but luckily the delightful Hannah Millard was able to get some really gorgeous shots of mine and Hubby's - who also got one on his forearm at the same time during our shoot last week.

Mine reads "Be brave & be kind" "Baby, we'll be fine" which is a bastardisation of the lyrics of "Baby, We'll Be Fine" by The National. The actual lyrics are 'Baby, we'll be fine, all we've gotta do is be brave and be kind', but I liked it better like this. 

Hubby's reads "...and where are your manners?" which is from The Twilight Sad song 'Cold Days From The Birdhouse'. I couldn't tell you what the fonts are, we found them on dafont.com and then had them slightly altered to suit our tastes (I got a different ampersand and he got different R's) but we are so in love with them.

We'd kind of been thinking about it for a little while - there are a hundred National lyrics I could get tattoo'd across my body (I'm considering another one already) - and we got recommendations from our friends about where was good to get it done, but in the end I felt like I was over thinking it. I knew I'd end up (wrongly) talking myself out of it if I thought about it much longer, and I knew didn't want that, so we just went for it. And it was so the right decision. I'm crazy in love with it, and with Hubby's too (he looks hot!).

(I swear I look so naked in this photo, but I'm totally wearing my wedding dress, promise) 

Did it hurt? I'm not going to lie, yeah, it did. But not really that much, and not half as much as I was expecting. The worst bits were the middle of the bigger text, towards the sides of my wrist hurt less and the smaller font barely hurt at all. It felt super weird though, the descriptions I read described it as like being scratched, which is accurate, but didn't really give much mention to the buzzing and the vibration. I swear I felt buzzy for like half an hour afterwards but that could have just been the adrenaline! I totally thought I was going to faint because I was so so nervous beforehand, but I didn't even cry. I just pulled a bunch of 'oo, oww, arrrgh' silly faces whilst Hubby watched on and laughed at me (just a little, I would've done too). But really, it was fine, and over in less than 10 minutes!

It healed like a dream, we put salvon and e45 on when it felt dry and washed them with soap and water. The worst bit of the whole thing was day 4-5 post ink when they got crazy itchy and flaky (sorry, I know that's gross). You're supposed to slap them so you don't peel the ink off with the skin, but it's not the same as itching. It passes pretty quickly though and now, a few weeks later, I wouldn't even know it were there if I didn't keep rolling up my sleeves to look at it. I really, really love it, so much.

Like I said, I've already got ideas for more (mostly text, mostly The National lyrics), so I'm pretty certain this won't be my last. I don't know how crazy I'll go - I love the idea of sleeves, but can't imagine I'd ever settle on imagery that I loved enough to commit to it, but I am kind of in love with the idea of being a Tattooed Lady!

Do you have any tattoos? Do you love them or regret them? Do you think it's possible to stop at just one (do people even ever get just one)? I always loved them on other people but couldn't really picture it on me, but now I couldn't picture us without them!