Crazy Cat Lady For Life!

Now that the cat is out of the bag about my first tattoo (sorry mom and dad!) I figure it’s a good excuse to post Suicide Girls-style pictures of myself on my blog! That’s what people who have tattoos do, right? I mean, I’m new to this whole thing, so you tell me. Also, being a writer and there being a ridiculous back story, I guess I’ll share that too.

I didn’t plan on getting a giant tattoo of Tyra on my bicep — or really getting a tattoo at all two weeks ago — but I had been casually tossing around the idea of getting a small cat tattoo for a little while. My dad said, it’s the crowd I run with, and I guess it is. I went to Chicago for the weekend to do some product testing with Nick Lipton, which we did, and you’ll be able to see soon. But the first day I was there consisted more of brainstorming than actual filming and after a few beers, the subject of tattoos came up. I mentioned I sort of wanted to get one, and Nick said, well, you gotta do it at least once, just to see what it feels like. Keep in mind, Nick has a tattoo of his coworker’s name on his ass that he got to prove tattoos don’t have to mean anything, so maybe not the best influence, but it sounded logical to me.

A few minutes later, I was at Tatu Tattoo on North Ave with this picture I took of Tyra in hand. I said I wanted to get it as a small line drawing on my arm, and the girl said ok, there’s four people in front of you, it should be about an hour. We went back to Nick’s house across the street to wait and pretty soon it had been well over an hour. Apparently the other tattoos were taking longer, and she called to say they were bringing in another artist and would be ready for me soon. About two hours later, I went back to meet Kenny Buck. I showed him the picture and he said, no problem, give me a few minutes to draw up a sketch.

About 15 minutes later, Kenny came back with a much larger drawing than I had planned on, but damn, it looked good. I told him I was thinking a bit smaller, but he said, “if we go much smaller than this, you’ll lose a lot of detail.” Now I don’t know anything about tattoos or tattooing, so I figured I might as well listen to him. He explained how he was going to make the head darker and the body lighter to mimick the depth of field in the photo and he seemed like he knew what he was doing, so I said, ok, just make it look good.

It took about an hour and a half, although the throbbing in my hand from having it dangle off the table made it feel much longer. I was doing ok though, until we got to the shading portion. Honestly, I had no idea he was planning on filling it in like he did, and holy shit, cutting skin over already cut skin does not feel good. But I guess that’s the fun of getting a tattoo, and it’s not like I could stop.

Approximately 4 hours after deciding to impulse get a tattoo, I had this. No, I don’t regret it at all and in fact, I’m really psyched on how it came out and that it worked out so well.

Check out more photos by Jared Souney after the jump.