Skip to main content

My chest tattoo experience: ferns, bird and bugs


Artist: Adam Trump at Ritual Tattoo, Guernsey

On Friday, I made a huge commitment. No, I didn't tie the knot with my very handsome boyfriend (that won't happen for quite some time, but maybe someday). I got a chest tattoo. I made the decision to become far more tattooed than my parents ever anticipated when I got my very first tattoo at seventeen. I am now (technical term coming up) pretty-reasonably-tattooed (okay, I was joking about the technical term). 



In this post I'll give a quick overview on how I came up with the concept, a description of the design process and talk about time/pain/difficulty-sitting. I hope you enjoy my thoughts, but just a quick note to politely ask that no-one copies my idea/design exactly. If this post has inspired you, I'm flattered, but please respect my tattoo artist's work and my individuality and find a design unique to you. Thank you in advance!

Anyway, on to the experience! 


Unfortunately (for some), there is no deep meaning to this tattoo. I, in fact, had a dream about the concept. I remember very little about the rest of the dream, but the ferns stuck in my head for months and I finally decided to take the plunge, with the bird and bugs as a welcome addition to fill out the piece and add to the nature theme. 

I should add here that I am having the piece coloured on the 3rd March, so it's not quite finished, but I thought I'd share what I have so far here. I'll update more when it's completed, of course. 

As for the experience with Adam at Ritual Tattoo, I must say it was excellent: very professional, yet friendly and Adam was a star in changing the design to fit my vision for the piece. Originally Adam had drawn up the piece with two birds rather than one and had included fewer insects, but he was happy to change to fit my specifications, which I really appreciated. Adam is incredibly talented and I would highly recommend his work. The tattoo studio is also beautifully decorated and so aesthetically pleasing (lots of cool nature-based stuff)! 


Moving on, as my seventeenth tattoo, I am aware of the pain involved, and this tattoo was far from painless. At first I had some issues with shaking, but as I became accustomed to the pain (and after Adam placed the heater about ten inches from my face), the shaking subsided and I sat relatively comfortably for five hours. Towards the end of the five hours, I struggled a smidge and was glad to have finished the line work, but I wasn't unbearably uncomfortable and could have probably sat for 30 minutes more if need had been. 

The sternum area was definitely the toughest, with the bugs near my armpit area coming a close second. The majority of the ferns were completely fine (read: definitely not painless but definitely bearable) and Adam even commented that it barely seemed like I was attached to the body he was tattooing (if that makes sense?) because I showed I was in pain very little. I do find I go quiet during tattoos, I must say. 

Overall, I'm so pleased with my decision to become a pretty-reasonably-tattooed-person! I couldn't be happier with the design and result. I hope you guys have enjoyed this overview of my experience and like the pics. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below, and also if you'd like to share your chest tattoo ideas/experiences, please do! I'd love to hear them! 

Here's to becoming an even-more-tattooed-person in the future! 

Over and out <3 


 Instagram: @jumper.dweller


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not-Dinner-Party-Appropriate: anecdotes from the mental hospital

 I feel like a time traveller. I've awoken in 2021, sleeping through a pandemic and my teenage years, now in my mid-twenties. I have no dinner-party-appropriate anecdotes. Only mental ill-health with bouts of questionable wellness. I have been in four different mental hospitals, which I predict could be four more than most people. No one talks about it, including me. Like, at all.  Whenever someone talks about mental illness, there is this most impenetrable silence, followed by: 'I knew someone who was depressed once.' Or a casual, almost nonchalant change of subject. I mean, we talk about mental health a lot - how to keep it afloat, how to do 'self-care' in a commercially-assisted sense. It's all body butters and face masks.  I don't like it when people reduce preventing mental illness down to looking after yourself or not. That is a large part of it, a whole team of people looked after me at my worst. Most things cannot be made better with a face mask.  It
3 comments
Read more

Imposters: a story about a Capgras delusion

  It's cold. I'm always so cold. My hands quiver blue and wrists bloom purple, after days of bang, bang, banging my wrist on the arm of my chair. I don't think I'm okay, but I don't think I'm not okay either. I think, I think, I think I'm breaking. I am on the children's ward. I have not seen my real parents for months. Some strange people visit sometimes. I hide from them. They are not my parents. They are often nice and I begin to trust them, then they'll do something off-kilter and I shy away again, like a beaten dog.  I had climbed out of a window, bawled through the lane outside the house and taken solace at a friend's home up the road. Gently I was led back to my childhood home and bundled into the car, driven to the hospital and admitted in hopes of finding a way to avoid another inpatient admission. We couldn't find one.  I arrive at the unit, brittle. Last time I was in this position, I had a home, but now I'm adrift. My parents
2 comments
Read more

Section three - a mental hospital anecdote

  There is so much that I can't tell you about my third admission, so much I can't remember. Illness blurs the details and the privacy I owe to my friends erases the daily minutiae of the unit. In short, I had been sectioned - section three, six months. A treatment order, that in retrospect, could probably have been avoided. Or maybe that is just what I like to tell myself when I think about it late at night.  I had found myself in a field, shivering in the early evening sun. It was July, I was in love, but still very, very ill. I had been taken on four occasions to our local accident and emergency department that week. I was, as I read later in my unit-admission report, 'no longer manageable in the community'. I was sad, but determined. I was determined to make an exit any way I could. Instead I was flown to Woking, heavily sedated - so much so that I have no memory of the journey there and was deemed 'unresponsive' in my admission interview.  I digress. So man
Post a Comment
Read more