Women and Tattoos

I waited a long time to get my tattoo (well, I have a few now, I'm talking my first one).  I always had a picture of what I wanted in my mind but I could never express it on paper.  Finally, one day while browsing through a book on Japanese culture I stumbled across a beautiful picture.  I asked my husband, a fantastic sketcher, to copy it down and "Allegra-ise" it.  And he did.  This is the result.

I was lucky enough to be in LA, Venice Beach to be precise, in 2009 and I made the decision to go under the gun.  It was a very windy day, the studio was right on the beach, like something out of an old movie.  The doors were all wide open, the sand was whipping through and the music was hard core metal.  The tattooists were real artists.  I showed them the picture and they set about recreating it, adding a few touches here and there.  We increased the size quite substantially (my husband later told me that he thought I was mad going under a gun for nearly five hours for my first one, but I don't do things in halves I guess!), got the positioning right and away we went..  Four and a half hours of, well I am not going to lie, down right agonising pain.  At one point they dispatched my husband to the closest shop to buy Coke - the full strength stuff full of sugar, as I nearly passed out.  Turns out my husband tells me later it's because for about a minute and a half I held my breath.

In the end I was crunched over a chair with the worst sand storm going on outside listening to music that made my head pound (but that could have been the gun going hell for leather for four hours on my skin), smoking (yes, bad I know but it gave me something to concentrate on) and drinking straight whisky, such was the pain.  The Australian authorities would have had a field day.  But you know what?  I wouldn't change that experience for the world.  It is a story I tell over and over again and a lot of people don't believe me.  To them I say, if you are ever at Venice Beach and fancy getting a tattoo, let me know and I'll point you in the right direction (the tattooists are all still there) and you can experience it all for yourself!

What a hell of a way to get your first tattoo.

They are discreet, I work in the corporate world so they can't not be, and when I am 70 they won't make me look like, well what ever it is 70 year old women with tattoos look like (I am not one to cast aspersions); they are just something I wanted to do.  So I did.