TARDIS Take Three!

This is the third session on this TARDIS in the middle of my thigh.  There will undoubtedly be at least four to five more.  I only say that because I know there is a ton more work to be done, and I'm sure that I'll only do an hour to two hours at a time for monetary reasons.  I have so many other tattoo ideas that I'm eager to get started on, but the rational person inside of me tells me that I have to wait until my thigh is finished before I can begin another project, unless it's a small tattoo that will be finished in on session (more on that later).  There's still the Phoenix on the back of my thigh that needs to be addressed, as well.  The thigh will be under construction for quite some time, I'm sure, unless someone gifts me lots of tattoo time.  I doubt that will be happening!

April 8, 2016 - Authentic Ink (Omaha, NE )

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• Location: Inner right thigh
• Tattoo:  TARDIS

My last session on my TARDIS was a year and a half ago.  I wasn't even sure what we'd be working on when I went into this session.  Authentic Ink just so happened to have had another Living Social deal, so of course I had to jump on it.  The last session ended quite swollen (due large in part to my being hungover).  That I expected, but what I didn't expect was the minor infection that followed.  It wasn't horrible, mind you, but it was bad enough.  If you've never had an infection from a tattoo, you're lucky, and hope you never do.  It's incredibly painful, no matter how minor.  There were a few spots where the color was minimal, or non-existent.  Still, not bad.  When I told Spike it had been infected, he was surprised and said it was the best a tattoo had looked after an infection that he'd seen.  So I had that going for me.  

I'm sure you can guess that since I had the infection and some missing color, he went to work on going over the color in the TARDIS again.  I had hoped to get to see some of the "space" part of the tattoo get done, but it was necessary to go over the TARDIS again.  This was one of the more awkward tattoo sessions, and one of the more painful, I must say.  I did fine for the majority of the time until we were nearing the end.  Spike asked if I wanted to take a break, and of course I said I could finish.  He asked if I was sure.  I told him it did hurt a bit, and he said it was swollen as fuck, so he bet it did.  Eventually we decided that I should take a break.  He sprayed some numbing spray and placed some plastic wrap over it for about 10 minutes.

It was quite irritated, to say the least.  The rest of the session went quite smoothly.  I hardly felt a thing.  That numbing spray really helps if you're having issues during tattooing.  When he was finally finished and I stood up... Damn.  I'm not sure I can even impress upon you all how incredibly swollen my leg was.  It didn't even look like my leg.  Even Spike had to exclaim how freaking swollen my leg was.

I'd say that when all was said and done and it was healed it looked damn good, though.  I'm more than eager to get back into the shop and get to work on what goes around the TARDIS very soon though.  There has been a floating TARDIS in the middle of my thigh for far too long.  It's time it gets some Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey going on!!

Until then, Cheers.

TARDIS for Two

Wow, it has been a very long time since I have posted anything.  I have gotten a new tattoo, as well as some additional work on an existing tattoo, since my last post, but I procrastinated in posting anything.  This is mainly due to the fact that the new tattoo I got just wasn't exactly what I wanted it to be, and I didn't know what I would even say about it.  As I write this, I'm still not really sure.  However, hopefully I will soon be getting some more work done, so before I do that, I need to play catch up with what's been done thus far.  So, I might as well get to it.

June 10, 2015 - Ink Shop (Kearney, NE )

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• Location: Side of left ankle
• Tattoo:  Girl in TARDIS dress

I got stuck back in Kearney (my hometown) for about a year and a half (from August 2015 to December 2015).  The reason behind be ending up back there for a year and a half is quite the juicy story, but I'll only going to share the cliff's notes of that ordeal, as I'm in the process of writing a novel about that.  I left Omaha in June of 2015 to move to the UK to be with my boyfriend (who is in the Air Force).  Anyway, things didn't exactly go as planned and I got deported.  Yeah, you read that right.  Deported.  It was a horrific ordeal, but it is now in the past, as is the relationship.

On to the tattoo and how it came about - - I started working at a brewery in Kearney, Thunderhead Brewing.  I needed something to get my mind off of my whole deportation business and the waiting game as to whether the visa we had applied for would be approved.  So, I got a second job serving at a brewery.  When I started working there another girl, April, had just started herself.  April had just gone through a rough breakup after a very lengthy relationship.  It just so happened that we also shared a love of Doctor Who, thus a friendship was born.  You could say we both needed each other at that very point in our lives.  We spent more and more time together at, and outside, of work.  Now I started working at Thunderhead late January, so it was only four short months after I started working there that we decided to get matching tattoos.  I know, crazy right?!  I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that thought, and still think, that's crazy.  Maybe they're right, but sometimes you just know that people will be in your life forever.  We are kindred spirits, and are definitely still friends today.  I've never regretted getting a matching tattoo with her.  

**Side note:  I would NEVER get a matching tattoo with a boyfriend, not even a husband.  That shit goes wrong all of the time.

To us, we're family.  We're in it forever.  So we came up with the idea to get girls wearing a TARDIS dress with "Allons-y" coming from each of them.  The idea was born from this:

We both loved the idea, but I can't stand having cookie cutter tattoos, as you should know by now from everything I've written up to this point.  So, I thought long and hard and decided that we should combine our love of Doctor Who with this concept.  I had come up with, what I thought, was a very clever idea.

We took to a tattoo shop in Kearney, which I had told myself that I would NEVER do, but someone we trusted gave them a stellar recommendation.  On Tuesday's they had a special, two identical tattoos for the price of one.  Seemed like a win, win to us.  So we go in on a Tuesday to get our tattoos.  

I begin pitching my idea, but it was like talking to a brick wall.  These people had no idea what Doctor Who, let alone the TARDIS, is!!  I couldn't believe it.  The artist pulls up some photos since he doesn't have the foggiest idea what I'm talking about.  After some back and forth, he seemed to finally understand what I was describing to him, so we left him to draw up our tattoo.  We had an appointment for a few hours later, so we went to get some dinner and a drink.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you shouldn't drink before a tattoo.  It was April's first tattoo though!! She was super nervous, so we each had just one beer, so nothing too crazy.

We arrived at the tattoo shop a little early for our tattoos.  He was finishing up on a couple of other matching tattoos (don't even ask about those).  When he was finished, it was our turn.  Of course they had to affix the stencil.  Everything looked OK with the stencils.  We stood back to back so that they would be directed at each other once finished.  April went first; she was a trooper.  I'll skip over my experience, as it wasn't anything too special.  It was a quick tattoo.  When we were all done, they tried basically charging us for both tattoos.  I fought them on that, as that wasn't what was advertised.  We still ended up paying too much, in my opinion.  

After the tattoos were finished, we went out for some drinks and dancing.  We got lots of compliments on our newly finished tattoos.  We both also spent the night dabbing blood from the fresh ink.  I'm sure our continued drinking had a little to do with that.  All in all, everything seemed great, and we had a fantastic day of it.

The healing was easy enough.  It wasn't until a few months later, and a deeper inspection, that I found that the tattoos weren't exactly up to par from what I'm used to.  About 10 months later, my regular tattoo artist gave me an ear full when I went in for some additional work on my TARDIS -- more on that later.

This is the finished product (night of whilst out drinking and dancing).

I am on the left, and April is on the right.

I hope to one day get them fixed up a little bit.  I'm not 100% sure what I will want to do exactly, but... it would be nice to make them a little nicer.

Moral of this story:  if a tattoo artist has a hard time understanding what you even want as a tattoo, you should probably choose a different artist.