Ink

My birthday present to myself this year is a set of tattoos.  I don't have any ink on me yet so this is new territory for me but I am really excited about it.  Over the years I have talked about the many different ideas I have had for tattoos but what I am actually going with is something new.

When I first discussed this topic I wanted a die or dice on one arm and a pair of cards on the other.  Both would be located on my inner arms, high enough up that they would be concealed by a normal long sleeve shirt.  Wendy long ago forbade me from getting aces for the cards, as she was unwilling to put up with five decades of aces up my sleeves jokes.  Fair enough, that.

However, this past year I was instead thinking of getting dragons tattooed on my back, two of them intertwined from bottom to top.  The idea was that their heads would come over my shoulders and they would be breathing fire down my arms.  The idea was really cool I think, but I ended up concluding that any tattoo that couldn't be seen in one piece was a bad idea.  I don't want to have to stand there with my arms over my head so people can see my tats!

Having made an appointment last week to get a consult about my ideas I have settled on two tattoos, one on each shoulder.  They are about 10 centimetres long, and they depict a one handed battle axe on my right shoulder and a shield with a wyvern on it on my left.  I could have gone with a sword instead but my long history with axes convinced me that I should do that instead.  They are going to look something like this:

The axe will be pretty much just as you see it.  The shield is going to be a combination of the two top shields, using the outline and textured finish of the historic shield with the wyvern on it instead of the cross and gold figures.

And yes, it is a wyvern dammit, not a dragon.  It has a barbed, poison tail!

As to why a wyvern instead of the more traditional dragon or some other thing entirely... I honestly have no idea except that obviously it has be a wyvern because wyverns are awesome.  I don't think I knew just how awesome until I contemplated getting one tattooed on my body.  These things are weird.

I am a big bundle of nerves and excitement all at once.  I think it is going to look fantastic and I look forward to being newly decorated, but it is also a lot of money and so I really want it to look good.  I am not particularly obsessive over the details, as I think the artist will probably do her best to interpret what I have put together into something great and I don't think that trying to micromanage is a good idea.  I am not an artist in this way, not at all.

Once the floodgates are open I suspect I am going to want more.  I already have ideas - a fox on my stomach, because foxes are my favourite colour and they have big fluffy tails which works with my obsession with orange capes.  For my back I am currently thinking about a female warrior in heavy armour holding two swords crossed above her head.  Thing is, there are people out there who are really anti tattoo, so once I finally get some and am over the line, I might as well go whole hog.

Plus there is probably a question about tattoos on the purity test, so I can knock my score down another point.

Interestingly my search for tattoo pictures on the internet really inspired me to continue to push my exercise routine.  The great majority of people modelling tattooes on the net are absolutely cut and I want to be the same.  Getting ripped and having cool tattoos is kind of linked in my head for some reason, so aside from a probably break to let my arms recover from the tattooing, I definitely want to keep working away at getting big arms the better to display my ink.