Snoqualmie

it looks excellent though! good job suffering thru the pain. it's going to be colored in, right? dark purples and bright reds?

Heheh. Good job, my ass. I'm the biggest sissy on the planet. Jacob can tell you.

Yep, it's going to be colored in. Green leaves, green stems on the tomatoes and red stems on the blackberries, deep purpley blacky berries and bright reddy orangey tomatoes.

Dude, those are very blackberry-y blackberries. And the leaves all look awesome. He works freehand? Mother of god.

Sweet! Well, and kind of tart, and fairly acidic.

that is gorgeous!!

Thank you thank you!

It wound up being a sort of modified not-really-freehand. We had a moment of mutual "what the fuck are you thinking" where he couldn't believe that I had actually thought he could lay out and outline the entire thing in one sitting, and I couldn't believe that he actually thought he could lay it out in sections and have it turn out looking cohesive. So what eventually happened was that he laid it all out really sketchily on a tracing of my back until I was satisfied that it would all connect properly, and then he cleaned up just this section into something stencil-able and did the tattooing from that.

The bottom-left tomato leaf and the cluster of blackberry leaves closest to my shoulder (not the very top cluster, the one to the left) are my absolute favorite bits except for maybe the top cluster of blackberries and the stem-part on the rightmost tomato. And the stem going across the horizontal part of the H, and that little flipped-up bunch of tiny tiny leaves right in the middle of my back. There's also that cluster of leaves poking through the O, but that hurt like the mother of all hurty things and I refuse to call it my favorite part until I forget how much it sucked.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I got to show my boobs to everyone in the shop for a solid hour and a half. That was exciting.

that is so amazing! (tatoo, not the peep show) however, every time i look at it i see pain, and it's not even my back. you are super brave.

what? weren't you allowed to lie down or cover yourself with something?

See, this is the myth that I'm trying to dispell. Less than five minutes into the tattooing itself I went green around the edges and had to take a fifteen-minute break while I tried not to pass out. Jacob had to run out and get me a soda and some lollipops and come up with ways to distract me. I am much more Super Sissy than I am Super Brave.

Well, yeah, I was offered options including taping a towel thing over my front or putting up a screen. But the towel thing sounded uncomfortable and I decided I'd feel better being able to look around at things to distract myself, so I just lay down and only flashed people when I got up. I did get interesting looks from a couple of guys who wandered in off the street, though.

I like the part where a blackberry stem is crossed by another stem right above the two O's.

Wow, for all my alleged disreputability, I've never paraded around a tattoo shop totally topless. You win this round.

And who says you're disreputable? It's nonsense; your reputation is very well known.

Holy crap, that's a nice art!

Holy crap, thank you! And then thank you some more, because if you hadn't reminded me to check out portfolios at Everlasting I probably wouldn't have found an artist yet.