The night before I was going to get my tattoo, we had dinner with my brother and his family. When my sister-in-law found out that I was going to get another tattoo, she spent the next two hours trying to convince me not to. She was cute about it, and funny, but she was serious, and very very persistent. She didn't change my mind, but I think she did get into my head.
Wednesday morning I woke up and I was definitely nervous about going to get my tattoo. Would we come up with a good design? Would I be able to stand the pain? Would I be happy with the tattoo? I say nervous, some would say excited. Two sides of the same coin, yeah? All in how you look at it.
I arrived at the tattoo shop a few minutes late, and Jacek was ready to get started on the design. Right away he let me know that he thought that including our wedding date in the tattoo was unnecessary and could take away from the design. Okay, I wasn't stuck on that detail, and could see letting it go. He spent quite a bit of time coming up with a box to house the Kanji symbol, a box that would include the wedding rings in its design. He came up with this cool box outlined in rope, with an infinity knot at the bottom and our wedding rings at the top. It was really cool watching him work, seeing the drawing come to life under his skilled artist's fingers.
Once he had that done, we started trying to figure out how to lay out the tattoo so that we could have the lotus flower and the box with the Kanji in it. And this is where it started to feel like banging my head against a wall. In order to keep the artistic integrity of the tattoo, there was a certain balance that needed to be maintained. And we could not find a balance that didn't include three lotus flowers and pretty much an entire half-sleeve on my upper arm, which was way more than I wanted to do. After much back and forth, Jacek suggested that maybe I give up the rings and the Kanji symbol and just get a flower tattoo, saying that I could assign any meaning I wanted to it. This was two+ hours into the design process, and I was super frustrated. At that moment, I really just wanted to leave the shop and not get a tattoo.
I went outside and called Donovan, pulling him out of an all-day training that he was in. I filled him in and shared my frustrations. I was really upset that Jacek wanted to take out all the elements of my tattoo idea that were wedding/marriage related, and at the same time I got where he was coming from with the layout issues. And I didn't want another tattoo that was just pieced together, I wanted a cohesive work of art. Talking to Donovan had me feeling better (as usual), and I went back inside with the intention of thanking Jacek for his time and leaving. I didn't want to burn any bridges, and was fully intending to pay him for the time he spent on my design.
I told Jacek that I really appreciated all the time he'd spent so far, and that it really felt like we were banging our heads against a wall. I told him I didn't want to burn any bridges, and I didn't know if we should continue working on the design. He said that I really needed to figure out what elements of the design were important to me. I teared up as I realized that what really mattered to me out of all the elements I'd originally suggested were the rings and the Kanji symbol. The flower was just decoration, but we'd spent over two hours trying to figure out how to make it the centerpiece of the tattoo. Now that we understood my priorities, Jacek got to work on designing a tattoo that had the Kanji symbol and the rings as its centerpiece. He had already spent all that time designing the really cool box for the Kanji, and now it was just a matter of incorporating some pretty things around it to soften it up. We went with cherry blossoms, which I already have on my koi tattoo that Jacek did for me. This time, though, instead of going with the more traditional cherry blossoms, we went with a more organic design that he had.
As he put the design on my arm with the transfer sheet that they use, it started to really come to life. Finally, after almost three and a half hours, we were ready to start tattooing! He started with the outline, as usual, and it was so cool to see the tattoo shaping up on my arm. The upper parts of the tattoo were definitely the most painful, especially the flowers on my shoulder. Once the outline was done (about 50 minutes?) he started on the color, and this is really what Jacek does SO well. His shading and choice of colors is absolutely amazing. I really had no idea what it was going to look like, but I knew there would be pinks and purple in it. We took a small break after about an hour and forty-five minutes, and then got back to work. After a total of two and a half hours, my tattoo was finished! Looking down at it, I was in awe. And when I got up and looked at it in the mirror, I had no words. This is exactly what I wanted, and I had absolutely no idea!
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| The finished product! |
Though we went through some super frustrating (for both of us) moments in the design process, it's clearly exactly what we needed to go through for me to figure out what was really important to me in my wedding/marriage celebration tattoo. Jacek was so great through the whole thing. He's a no bullshit kind of guy, and he told me when something wasn't going to work. But he stuck with it, and was determined to create a tattoo that I would love. Which he SO did!! I'm so in love with my new tattoo!!! :)
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