If you remember way back to March 2016, I posted all about my arm tattoo. If you want a refresher, you can find it here: New Ink: From Start to Finish.
Short version of the story is that each flower on my sleeve represents a birth month of a family member – Violet (February, Jack), Peony (April, my twin sisters), Daisy (also April, my husband), Lily of the Valley (May, my dad), Chrysanthemum (November, my brother) and Daffodil (December, my mom). After spending a decade or so thinking about it, it was thrilling that it was finally on my body and better than I could have imagined. It took 12 ½ hours, but it was exactly what I wanted. I was super happy! And it was finally done.
Well, I thought it was done.
But every time I looked at it I kept thinking that I might want it to go down a little further. Just a bit. I actually thought this way back when the first stencil was put on my arm for the very first session… but I wimped out. Frankly, when you are getting a large tattoo on you, the idea of telling the artist to make it EVEN BIGGER is scary!
Also, I knew that I wanted to be able to easily cover my tattoo for when I was at work. So, the design being a little shorter means that it was easy to hide with a longer short-sleeved shirt. I decided to live with it for a year and if it still bothered me, I’d go ahead and add on.
Oh yeah, there were also negotiations with my husband. He’s not a tattoo person, so he needed some convincing on why I needed even more ink on my body.
So, a year passed and I started thinking of what I’d like to add on to the design. I really liked the way that the yellow daffodils looked with the rest of the flowers and thought I’d want to add a couple more. Also, it was pointed out to me (many, many times) that my own birth month was not represented. I looked into the September flowers and decided to add either an aster or a morning glory to the design.
When deciding on the scheduling of my tattoo appointment, I decided to wait until after we did our trip to the Great Wolf Lodge. The last thing you want to do to a new tattoo is stick it in potentially germy water. I also wanted to give it as much time to heal as possible before we did our Florida trip. So, I decided on the end of February. That way there would be 10 good weeks of healing before we went to Universal Studios.
I stopped by the shop to see my artist and he did a quick sketch of the portion of my arm I wanted to fill. We also spent some time talking about what flowers would work best and ended up deciding to add two daffodils and two morning glory flowers. He took my source material and I went on my merry way…
At some point between our meeting and my appointment, the sketch of my arm and source materials disappeared. No big deal though, because my artist would actually rather draw the flowers directly on my arm (with marker) to make sure that they flow right into my existing sleeve of tattoos.
I’m going to be honest, this part was scary as hell.
The fact that he was going to just draw on there and I wouldn’t be able to see what the finished product would look like sounds totally insane to me. However, Eric has already spent 12 ½ hours on my arm at this point and I know he does good work. I had to take a deep breath (or 10) and trust him.
So I did. And it is absolutely amazing how he went from this:
To this:
To this:
To this:
That session lasted 4 hours, bringing my ink total for the half-sleeve up to almost 17 hours. I let it heal up for a few months and then ran around my house last week to try to find the best light to show you what it looks like in person…
I love it.
And this time it really is done.
My mom has a “mother’s ring” tattoo on her inner forearm. She has a diamond (her birthstone) at the top, then “falling” from the diamond she has her kids’ birthstones: a yellow topaz for me, a diamond for my brother, a amethyst for my sister, a emerald for my sister, and a ruby for my brother. After those, she has her grandkids’ birthstones: a sapphire for my nephew, a yellow topaz for my niece, a yellow topaz for my nephew, an aquamarine for my daughter, a peridot for my niece, and an aquamarine for my niece.
Love it- really gorgeous and it does look more complete with the added flowers. I have one I need to add to (for kids born after getting it) but have no idea what I want. Maybe it can be a birthday project.
I have been thinking of adding the birth flowers to mine to fill in some gaps. I also wish my tattoos were bigger. Currently my arm piece is only on the inside of the arm because I was chicken, but I end up covering my arms to my elbows at work anyway!