Inky

The most common question about my tattoos (or maybe second after “do you know what you’ll look like when you’re old?”) is how they’re viewed at work. Long before I started getting heavily tattooed, I considered what it would mean to work in an office – high necked tops, cardigans and long sleeves, no neck tattoos until I’m old or important enough to get away with it.

Herbert Heisenburg

Since I’m too broad shouldered for deep V-necks anyways, I considered it a worthy trade-off and dove in. Although having long arms have made covering my tattoos a bit more difficult than I had expected, I’m generally successful in keeping them mostly out of sight. People see them, though – in the summer when I’m attempting to slip into the change rooms unnoticed in my sweaty bike gear; at social events or training when I’m dressed down; when I get lazy and wear a 3/4 sleeve t-shirt and hope I don’t have any important meetings.

Somewhat surprisingly, in the 3 years I’ve been working in the department, I’ve had one negative comment (couched as concern, because diplomats are smooth that way) and countless positive ones. Lots of people want to know what the story is behind them, show me their tattoos, and make me take off my blazer in the cafeteria (usually when my boss is walking by).

I promise I’ll stop using pictures from our elopement soon. Blame Kateryn Silva for taking such good photos, and the only photos of my tattoo in its current form.

It helps that I don’t have any tattoos of zombies or swear words, and that I’m not otherwise very sartorially edgy (see above: cardigans and high-cut tops). But I like to think that it’s mostly because people recognise that the days of tattoos being the domain of sailors and jailbirds are over, and that there are lots of otherwise “normal” people who like tattoos as an art.

Presumably there are people that disapprove, but are polite enough to keep their opinions to themselves, which I admire (it’s a skill I’m working on with little success). But even those people must be able to differentiate between my style and my content, as it were.

I admit to a little nervousness about how my tattoos will be received in other countries. Certainly as a backpacker, I always got a lot of compliments (and requests to pose for photos, feeding my hope that one day I’ll get to be a model in a whisky ad in Japan). But my hope is that they won’t be viewed negatively in a professional environment.

At least they’ll always be a great ice-breaker for visiting prisons.

Quarter Century Recap

In anticipation of my birthday, I’m reviewing my list from last year. I did much better this year – I hit 17 out of 25 things. A few were things I opted out of – the Ottawa City Chase turned out to be a totally different event than I thought, and I wasn’t interested in it; a long board was impractical considering I had just bought a bike.

My sleeve is sooooo close to being finished, so that stings a little. And my french is slipping despite my best efforts, just because I don’t get to use it very often.

I’ve also discovered that there’s a limit to how many different kinds of exercise I can do – I’ve been really proud of my running and biking this year, but adding yoga classes to that when I’m still also trying to get to the gym every once in a while is just ridiculous. I do pull out my mat for stretching at home, but I’ll leave yoga for when we’re living in a country where I can’t run as easily – hopefully there’ll be yoga on the expat scene.

As I mentioned here, I definitely cooked way more than 10 new things, and particularly in the past few months have really started to stretch out of my comfort zone… and learned that the food blogging life is not for me! Sometimes as I’m eating I’ll briefly entertain the notion of stopping and taking some photos, but…. oh well. It’s an over-saturated market, let’s be honest.

It’s really fun to have this list throughout the year, to consider when I’m trying to figure out something to do and remind myself to not waste so much time on reddit. Although I may have to come up with a new format soon – the older I get, the longer the list becomes!

Next year’s coming up soon.

I’m sure you already know this

but please, if you want a tattoo, go find a tattoo artist to design it. Not your friend who can draw, not anyone on the internet, and for the love of pete, nobody on reddit.

Here’s the thing. Paper is flat. Skin is not. And everyone is shaped so differently that there’s very little chance that something drawn on paper will happen to fit your body correctly, especially if you want it on a curvy surface like an arm or a leg. And sure, I bet your friend is great at drawing, but it’s going to be on you for life – trust the professional artist for things like size, placement, and how pieces will fit together.

turkeys are the new owl

When I first consulted about my sleeve, I went in with some ideas and a bunch of photos from google images. Scott spent a lot of time drawing on my arm, and later sketching out a stencil, so that everything would flow and fit and just generally look good. It makes me cringe when I hear people say that they or a friend designed their tattoo, because odds are it’s very obvious.

Now that I’m nearing completion on my right sleeve, I’m thinking about my left arm. I have a general idea of what I want, and I think I have some artists narrowed down. I’m slowly gathering reference material so that I can hand it off to the tattoo artist to design something amazing.

Despite my lack of a tattooed Barbie, I turned out okay

I keep seeing obnoxious “news” articles (read: thinly veiled attempts at provoking high comment numbers) about how the new tattooed Tokidoki Barbie is shocking parents and ruining young girls for all time. Although I try really hard not to read comments on things like this, I sometimes can’t help myself, and so I just thought that I’d let all the trolls out there that despite my tattoos, I went to university, have a job, am not a zombie, am most certainly not a prostitute, do not have STIs, do not live in a trailer park, do not do drugs, and wouldn’t sleep with them either.

Sick backpiece, Barbie!

I KNOW – I have to stop reading comments on those sites. But seriously?! One of my tattoos is based on my Master’s thesis, for pete’s sake! I’m a civil servant – I not only have a job, I have a boring-sounding desk job! Although I guess I would make a pretty bad-ass looking zombie.

Oh Deer

This past weekend, I went to the Montreal Tattoo Convention to get some work done on my sleeve.  Scott does the convention most years, although last year he got incredibly sick and had to cancel.  Happily, this year all went well, and we were able to get in almost 6 hours of work!

Not a female deer

The convention was really interesting – tons of great artists, lots of beautiful tattoos, and really cool people.  I got my fill of “alternative subculture well-known people” sightings, including meeting Scott’s wife Ashley (who’s blog I’ve read for ages, and who is super cool – I felt like a geeky fangirl), seeing Zombie boy, and getting photographed by Steve Prue (which looked great, except for my sleepy just-got-tattooed face; I see zero modeling in my future!).

As for getting tattooed at a convention, though, I can’t say I loved the experience.  It was not as good an atmosphere as I’m used to – no comfy tattoo chair (which are like dentist chairs or massage tables), the music was not awesome, and there were lots of people watching, taking photos, and trying to stop me on my way to the bathroom to look at my arm (which was always wrapped, of course).

In some ways the distractions were welcome, because it was nice to people-watch to take my mind off the pain, but it also made it much more difficult to get in the groove of ignoring the pain towards to end.  I find that the first and last hour of a tattoo session are always the worst, but they were much more so this time because my normal techniques didn’t work.

All that being said, I’m super glad I went, and would do it again for sure.  The benefits outweighed the negatives by far, and overall I had a lot of fun and met some really cool people!  I also added a ton of tattoo artists to my want-to-get-tattooed-by list; of course, my knack for choosing far-away artists kicked in and most of them were even further away than Scott is now!

Besides the convention, I also got to meet my friends Matt and Erika’s new puppy, a mini-wiener dog named Willow, who was so cute!  I also popped in to one of my favourite restaurants ever, Olive et Gourmando, and found a great espresso place by Erika and Matt’s place called Pikolo.  Montreal was a bit of a let-down the first time I went, I think because it had been so built up for me by so many people (that happens to me with movies all the time), but it definitely is starting to grow on me.  There are a lot of really cool and unique things there, and I’d love to get back this year for a shopping and exploring trip.

So, I still can’t cross the sleeve off of my list, because I’ll probably need at least one more session, but it’s definitely getting close!

I Won’t Kneel

Wow, having huge traffic today makes me feel obligated to post something.  Unfortunately I’m super tired from the weekend so it’s going to suck.

First of all, listen to this:

Which will hopefully improve your reading experience.  I got tattooed to this album (Groove Armada’s Black Light White Light Remix) on the weekend, and when I bought it off of iTunes last night I was a little confused that it didn’t have a buzzing tattoo machine sound in it anywhere.

We’ve been working on my sleeve for ages (I was a jerk and moved to Ottawa right after we started) and since he was going to be in Toronto for the weekend, it meant that I didn’t have to drive all the way to Kincardine.  We got a solid 5 hours in, which was fabulous.  We might have been able to get more, except that when I got there at 1, Scott met me outside and explained that the keys his friend had given him to the shop didn’t work.  So off we went on a side trip to get the keys, busting into the most adorable little girl’s birthday party to ever be thrown by a tattoo artist and his horror-magazine editing wife – I definitely think that their place should end up on Off Beat Home, since it was so amazing.

Travis the Turkey, in progress

Anyways, we got back and into the shop, and were able to work from about 3 until 8.  After that, I was pretty spent, and Scott wanted to stop because he was running the Toronto Marathon the next morning (how awesome is that, by the way?), so we quit.  I feel obliged to brag extensively about the fact that he praised how well I sit while getting tattooed, which means I have tattoo cred.  I mean, I figure that my only two jobs as a tattoo-ee are to sit still and pay the man, but apparently it’s harder for some people to do that first one (and maybe the second one, who knows?).

After that, I went to Oakville for a few beers with my friends, which was good times.  I felt like a bit of a tool in this pub with my arm wrapped up in saran wrap, but for all I know everyone thought I was really cool.  Our whole group was dressed pretty casually, but we got there just in time to snag a table, so we had fun laughing at all the girls dressed to the nines in high heels that had to stand.  We also tentatively (and less-than-soberly) discussed doing a fun girl’s weekend in San Francisco (my totally random suggestion) so we’ll see about that – it would be super fun, so hopefully I can finish French in time to have some vacances!

Yesterday, I got back during the late afternoon, and although I went to bed nice and early, I ended up waking up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep for almost an hour, and then when I finally did, I started having a nightmare about scary hill people and had to wake myself back up (a very useful skill, by the way – I always dream lucidly enough to pull myself out if the situation gets hairy), so I was exhausted today.

La fin de la semaine!

I know, in France, they just call it “le weekend,” but Canadian french is fierce about anglicisms, so we get this literal gem – the end of the week.  I hear “bon weekend!” a lot, though.

Gatsby wishes you all a lovely weekend

I’ve decided to jump on the “Friday links” bandwagon and share some things that I’ve come across on the good old inter-connected network this past week.

Sesame Street is teaching kids about financial responsibility!  I especially like the “spend, save, share” trifecta, as that’s pretty much the system that Eric and I use now.

I came across this genius list of tattoo etiquette on little chief honeybee, entitled “the guide to not being a douche.”  I have to exactly times a million the first point about not touching my tattoos – it’s so creepy!  I also have to add my own: stop asking if I’ve thought about what they’ll look like when I’m old.  As a human, I am capable of thinking about the future, so the answer is obviously “yeah, they’ll look badass.”

A wonderful list of 50 ways to cope with stress.

A group encouraging youth voters – our federal election is coming up soon on May 2!  If you don’t vote, we can’t be friends anymore, so get out there.

I love these carnival prints from Black Apple!  I think I’m going to buy one as soon as I decide on my favourite.  I’m leaning towards this one:

Emily Martin via Etsy

That’s all from me today.  I’m headed to Kingston tomorrow for a long-overdue mother-daughter weekend, so cross your fingers for me that the weather network is dead wrong about all the rain and cold temperatures we’re supposed to get!