I get a tattoo

Sometime in January, I decided that I wanted a tattoo of Maia and Kristina. So we went to the Manoa Elementary School to play on Sunday at the end of January, I took my camera with me and took a bunch of pictures of Kristina and Maia. The last one came out the best, and I selected that one for the tattoo. That's the pic up there--the same one I used in a recent post.

I made an appointment in February. Tattoo shops (at least this one) are surprisingly busy, and the first available slot for Heather was in March--yesterday, Saturday, March 6th, in fact.

I had located Heather on the internet. She had included portraits among her specialties.

This is Heather.

The first thing she did was to make several photo copies of different sizes so she could figure out what size would work best on my chest. Then she transferred the image to a stencil,

and the stencil to my chest:




Six hours later,



it looked like this:



Maia liked it. She wanted to know how long it would last.
"Forever."
"Tomorrow?"
"Forever."
"What if you die?"
"Even then."
"What if somebody cut it all out so it was all bloody."
"Well, okay. Not then. But nobody is going to do that.

Kristina wanted to know why it had to be so big, how much I had paid for it, how I knew that I wasn't going to get sick from the needles Heather used, etc.

She liked it, too.

"You could have just gotten initials," she said.

Maia's verdict the next day: "Gross, but so awesome."

John, Sunday, March 7, 2010