For my 76th birthday, I decided I wanted to do something new, something I’d never done before. The question was, what?
The month prior, my partner had gotten a clever tattoo on his arm. His left arm had a long scar on it, from his wrist to his elbow, where he’d had an open fracture reduction many years ago. It was hardly noticeable, but he’s a clever fellow and got the idea of having a ruler tattooed over the scar. Then, when he’s knitting or gardening and needs to measure something, well, he wouldn’t have to stop and look for a ruler!
So, anyway, he got a tattoo. So, of course, that made me want one, too. In any case, that become the “something new” I was going to do for my birthday.
I figured if I was going to get a tattoo, it should be in a place where people could actually see it, so I settled on the back of my right hand. I knew that in June I’d be going to SoonerCon, a big convention for science fiction readers and creators, so I figured something with a SciFi theme would be appropriate, especially since I had no intention of joining in the CosPlay. (That’s costume play, for the uninitiated, i.e., me.)
When I did a web search, I found lots of hand tattoos, but I wasn’t interested in one for Pirates, or Bikers, or even Star Trek enthusiasts. I eventually found some rifs on Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” That’s the famous painting on the Sistine Chapel of two fingertips touching. The one I found had one of the fingertips living and the other skeletal, which added kind of a life-death meme to it. I put it against a kind of SciFi backdrop, a sytlized solar system, and got this design–with a little help from AI for the touching fingertips.
Here’s how it turned out.
I liked it so much, I decided to get another tattoo, but that’s for another blog. A friend warned me this could be addictive…
By the way, Steven, the man who cuts our hair used to be a full-time tattoo artist. He’s got a lot of tattoo art posted around his hair-cutting station, and he’s recently started doing tattoos again on a part-time basis. That connection is another reason for both of us getting tattoos: we had a lot of confidence in his abilities and artistic sensibilities. His advice certainly helped with the above design, and he did an awesome job executing the fine details.
Oh, and if you’re wondering, it didn’t hurt at all to get the tattoo. Well, at least not enough to make me even wince while he was doing it. I think this might have to with Steven’s gentle technique.
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