MOAR ink?! I suppose I still have some valuable real estate left as yet untouched, but I also don’t know if my pain tolerance is what it once was in my wilder youth.
In the pic, you’ll see the top of my back piece. It’s a combination of the butterfly from the Lords of the Underworld series by Gena Showalter, and the tattoo adorning the main character in the Kushiel’s Legacy series by Jacqueline Carey. I’m not sure if I can share someone else’s cover art here without upsetting the WordPress police, so you may have to give it a Google, if you’re curious. Kushiel’s Chosen has a great view of the tatt on the cover.
With the Kushiel’s tattoo, I had the artist invert the original design and skip the rose, so it’s just the rather tribal-looking detailing around the open rose, trailing up my back rather than down it. The kind of spoke pieces that framed the rose sit closer to the small of my back, where I have a Celtic circle of three ravens, which I found on a website dedicated to the Morrighan, but which may have been lifted from elsewhere; I found out later it was formerly the label art for Ravenswood Wine. Then again, maybe it’s a chicken/egg sort of thing.
I also have a cat face with yellow/green eyes on my belly (my first tattoo, when I was more looking for something flirty, before my ink got fiercer), and an armband of the Mandarin characters for “like tiger add wings,” meaning, “Like adding wings to a tiger,” an idiomatic expression I have since learned has a much broader range of interpretations than I first suspected.
When I first encountered the phrase online, I had been looking up the meaning behind Jack’s tattoo from the series Lost. I decided against matching his because I found out some of it is the more formal style for characters and some wasn’t, so it kind of contains a “typo” in that sense, since strictly one would pick either/or for writing, not a mix.
Eventually, the internet rabbit hole took me to “like adding wings to a tiger,” which seemed to mean something becoming twice as strong as it already was. Having just gone through a tumultuous breakup (and subsequent epic breakdown), I thought it perhaps fitting.
My daughter has expressed to me that I should get a tattoo in her honor since I CLAIMED my ink was uber-meaningful…Though is it still? Immortals with demons bonded inside them, learning to cohabitate with these beings initially beyond their understanding, that aren’t necessarily actually evil? A revered concubine with ties to a god who helps her heal from any inflicted injury though she still feels the pain?
The Morrighan one, maybe, since I am Irish American, primarily. Even the cat face came to mean more, when I learned Bast was the Egyptian deity known for turning the child in the womb so that it might be born with greater ease.
I’ve also debated honoring our cats with ink. But, again, ow. How I sat through a 3 hour back piece with only 3 breaks for fresh air, I will never know.
Where would I put them? Kiddo’s tattoo, theoretically, would go on my left arm, and the cat ones, on my calves or ankles, since kitties wind around your feet.
All the Bright and Sparkly Things 
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