I have a couple of tattoos and a few piercings. I like them for the individual I feel they make me. Yet I giggle inside about the fact that one day I'm sure to be in a long term care facility and that I'll be sagging all over the place with this unique body art that will surely be lost on whomever is wiping my ass at that time (graphic, yes, but come on, it's true!)
Here's the story of my body art:
Tattoo #1
Tattoo: "Made in Canada" framing a maple leaf. How patriotic! (and true! I was "made in Canada" I verified it with my mom just to be sure!).
Location: Inside my right ankle. It got a little messed up when the needle hit my ankle bone and I flinched with a WTF kind of reflex! As a result it reads "Nade in Canada"!
Date of Tattooing: I'm a little fuzzy here. I'm guess-timating it was in the summer of 1989; possibly 1990)City of Tattooing: Near Springdale, Newfoundland, Canada.
Location of Tattooing: A stranger's basement. No, seriously. There were no tattoo parlours in NFLD in those days!
Accompanied by: Matthew Hancock, boyfriend at-the-time. He was born in Springdale NFLD.
Occasion: Hancock family homecoming trip to NFLD .
Side notes: That same day, Matthew had a tattoo with an outline of the province of NFLD which said "Home Sweet Home". I still think it was kind of cool that we were country/province-loving first time tattoo recipients! Also, my "Made in Canada" tattoo is what I lovingly refer to as my HIV / HEP RISK tattoo (when I was too young to know/understand hygiene and risks of lack there-of),
Tattoo #2
Tattoo: A rabbit made of stone. A rabbit. NOT A BUNNY! I made sure there was to be no bunny-like being on my body....
Location: On my back, between my shoulder-blades.
Date of Tattooing: Christmas 2006. It was a Christmas gift between Paul and I. He and I both had that rabbit permanently embossed on our bodies in the same place.City of Tattooing: Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Location of Tattooing: Yonge St. Tattoos. Eric who did the drawing and the work, but he's no longer there : (
Accompanied by: Paul Kralik, my loving husband who got the same tattoo in the same location.
Occasion: Christmas, bonding.
Side notes: Paul and I chose to have rabbit tattoos emblazoned on our backs. Paul's last name (Kralik) means "little rabbit" in Slovak. That's the basic meaning behind them.
But there's another part of the "deep meaning" of the tattoos: I had been *desperately* attempting to draw an Inukshuk verison of a rabbit in my drawing class. (An Inukshuk is a man-made stone landmark or cairn used by the Cairn, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic region of Northa America, from Alaska to Greenland. To me it represented northern Ontario where I spent a lot of time as a child).
I was, at the time, pretty serious about being able to draw my own future tattoo. But I had to come back down to reality eventually! I gave up and handed over the idea to Eric who came up with what he did.
Eric also informed me that I happened to be allergic to the red ink of my first tattoo, which had kind of gone brown a little at the red edges....
I love the body stories I carry!
Do you love yours too?
Do you love yours too?
I went and had a little shark tattoo on my arm in my youth. It's beginning to look a bit wrinked now, though :-)
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