all the lights of midnight

So last week I finally decided to stop procrastinating and went down to the tattoo studio in the city centre and got my seahorse.
 

( picture under the cut )

 

Please excuse the weird/awkward angle of the photo; it's sort of at a really difficult spot to take a picture of, I have to twist my legs into peculiar angles in order to see it, heh.

Anyway, yes. I like it a lot. It was so much more difficult getting it done than it was the first one, somehow - it took five or six tries to find a placement I was happy with, and then once I'd finally settled on one and the tattooist got started - it really hurt. Which is strange, because other than a few moments of "ouch", I remember being quite surprised by how not-painful the first one was - more like a mild electric shock than anything sharp and pointy. This one, though, this one felt like being stabbed wih knives repeatedly in the same spot. Ow.

Nonetheless, I got through it, I was very proud of myself, and it's there now.

***

I read a message board thread a few days ago about tattoos with meaning/significance, people discussing what their tattoos meant to them, whether they had a 'meaning' or had just been chosen because they looked good. My Escher tattoos do have a meaning to me, but it's not one I can easily sum up - nothing as straightforward as "I got this lilac in memory of my grandmother because she loved lilacs" or "a pink heart to mark the occasion of my daughter's birth" or things like that. They just sort of... between them, sort of connect to a lot of things that I love, that have meaning for me, and that are important to me, and because of that, they are stupidly meaningful to me, even though to anybody else they don't really look like anything except odd little colourful designs (though I also hope they look pretty, at least. I think they do, which I suppose is what matters). Also, I have said ‘meaning’ far too much in this paragraph and I’m now getting that thing where it starts to lose its, uh… meaning.