a skull for her and dinosaurs for him

i find tattoos intriguing for a couple of reasons. one, once you get one, you almost instantly want another. what's up with that? they aren't cheap and they hurt. i mean, don't get me wrong, they are often super cool (although equally often, super awful), but what is it in our brain that tells us to get more and more and more tattoos? two, i love looking at other people's tattoos. i'm so interested in knowing the rational for them. why did you get that? why in those colors? three, once you have a tattoo you become part of this community of tattooed people. when i got my first tattoo, that was a very small community of people that i knew, but as i've gotten older and met more people that community has grown. and i'm not sure why, but it is a community. i mean, you don't feel camaraderie with other people with pierced ears, noses, etc, do you? maybe it's because tattoos are so permanent that we feel closer to others who've made the same commitment as us.  

another thing i find so interesting about tattoos are different people's approach to them. i like to design my tattoos and i have to have them all planned out in advance. so when i walk into the tattoo parlor i can sit down, give them exactly what i want, and get it done. rcg on the other hand, is very different. he gets an idea, does some research and then sends it off to the tattoo artist. he learns what the tattoo will look like when we show up to the appointment, and then he lets the tattoo artist further improvise with color and details. the crazy part is we are both equally pleased with the results when we leave. 

______________________________________________________________

it's been a while since my last tattoo, but ever since moving to mexico i have been thinking about getting a new one. i knew i wanted a skull but i had a hard time figuring out what exactly i wanted it to look like. i love the sugar candy skulls of dia de los muertos, but they were too intricate for what i wanted, so i started to look at the skulls i saw around tucson for inspiration and i got a lot of ideas. 

   

left: a skull pin from popcycle // middle: a skull painted on the side of the rialto theatre in tucson // right: a painting hanging in borderlands brewery

then i doodled a ton. 

     

finally drawing the perfect skull.

and here's the final result -- a flowered skull in among my other flowers:

______________________________________________________________

like i said before, rcg goes about getting his tattoos very differently than i do. when he got his first tattoo, he knew he wanted to get the cover of one of his favorite albums, but he also let the tattoo artist have a little freedom by adding flames and feathers. this time, was similar. he was (is) really into dinosaurs; he wanted to become a paleontologist when he was younger. so as a tribute to that, he decided he wanted a dinosaur tattoo. his idea was for a scene going from his shoulder to his back, with a couple of predators looking around his shoulder, hunting a pack of herbivores on his back. after deciding that, he made sure both species (allosaurus and apatosaurus) were from the same period, and then let hh, our tattoo artist, design it and pick out the colors. (this is part one, stay tuned for part two!)