ELMO KEEP

Emily Gould has hit nostalgia GOLD with her My First Tattoo series.

thingsiatethatilove:

“My first tattoo IS BAD.  It’s meta now, which I think makes it much worse.”

— Elmo

SO, the little stars. OK. They were my first tattoo. I’ve since had a lot more done, including one that covers almost half of my back. But that was many years away, about 12 years, when I decided at the age of fifteen to get the little stars, which I thought at the time were totally badass.

When I think back on it now, the whole adventure was so patently not badass. My two best friends and I were sitting around one of our parent’s houses, and thinking about how to fill the holidays. I’m not sure who among us raised the tattoo idea, but once someone had, so began a day where we chased our parents across their various offices and places of work in the city to get their written permission so we get these tattoos. The en masse jedi mind tricks of teenage girls were clearly in working our favour, when after about four hours we trooped off to a particularly divey shop in a particularly divey part of town, our parent’s signatures in hand.

The dude at the shop was pretty whatever about it all; three clearly over-hyped girls who’d tried smoking a joint first to calm down (to no avail) rocking up to his shop with what we said were notes from our parents (they were!). “What do you want to get?” he asked as we realised we hadn’t thought that far. So of course we ended up getting some flash off the walls (OH MY GOD THAT COULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH WORSE. One flaming skull, please!) I chose the stars, one of my friends got a tiny red loveheart and the other got something which I think I remember was the Egyptian symbol of ‘the soul’s journey through life’? (I told you there was weed involved.) When it was done it resembled tiny squiggled lines which have since all bled into eachother in a pretty blob. We all got them on the same spot on our left hip.

Anyway, as you can see, the ‘artist’ was absolutely terrible. I remember it hurt quite a lot more than I thought it would, and that he pushed down really hard on what it turned out was essentially a blunt needle. Look at the line work! Terrible. In the years since I’ve thought of getting it fixed, or covered over, but really I’d rather preserve the memory.

When I got the add on, that came about when I was getting another piece done a couple of years ago and the artist asked me what my first tattoo was. So I showed him, “I should get an arrow pointing out ‘my first tattoo’,” I said.

“If you get that, I’ll do it for free.”

“Hahaha!”

“No really.”

And so it goes.