Done!

It is hard to fucking believe, but the tattoo is done.* It's beautiful. It hurt. A lot. But I was kind of sad to say a last goodbye to my tattoo guy, and mentioned that I was already thinking of my next one. Maybe in the summer.

"After you've forgotten about the pain," he said.

Really, it takes about two weeks for me to forget about the pain.

It was kind of odd this time because I was alone with my tattoo guy. Normally the other tattoo guy is there as well along with another client. This time, it was just me and J. and my escaping mammaries.

I think this is the next thing the Misses Manners and Etiquette need to tackle. What's the appropriate response when you look down and instead of seeing your shirt, see a nipple?

The first option is to cover it up again, but that just seems weird, because you know he's seen it, not staring at it, no, but hopefully paying very close attention to the skin he's jabbing needles into about 3 inches underneath the offending appendage. I felt like covering it up would be kind of like admitting one of us had done something wrong. What that something would be, I have no idea.

The second option would be to just give up and let the nipple run free. But (and this is going to sound weird to anyone who reads this blog regularly) I'm kind of shy. Seriously. I talk a good game, and can occasionally get my gumption up to do something revealing in public, but generally, what you get here or up on stage is much more revealing that what you'll get out of me in person.

I couldn't decide which was the best course of action, so I swung back and forth. Sometimes I yoinked my shirt down, sometimes I pretended I didn't have nipples.

My tattoo guy, who is a brilliant tattoo guy, and very nice, was entirely stoic and did a very good job of not noticing whether they were out or in. Bless his heart.

* It might be longer till the pictures come, because some of the colouring he did is really light. And really light blocks of colour look like angry angry bruises for about the first 5 days. And then they look like flaky snakeskin. Hot.