Listen to This

Whoever is reading this, I have an important message for you. Never — and I mean never, ever — let your drunk friend dip a needle in fire and use it to tattoo you. I have no idea what came over me that night when my friend said, “let’s do a stick and poke,” but let my experience be a warning to you all. My friend had seemed very eager to attempt her new design, and I thought that since she’s an incredible artist on paper, she might do an alright job on my arm. I was wrong! As she had been sketching out the image of the bird, her hand became limp and useless and dragged all the way across my elbow. Now, the design just looks like a misshapen building with a random line through it. 

I’ve had the stick and poke tattoo for more than a month now, and I’m sick of it. Today, I’m visiting what is apparently the best tattoo shop Brisbane has ever seen in order to get the design fixed. I’m just tired of strangers pointing at my arm, or people I know coming up to me and asking what the tattoo is meant to be. It’s embarrassing when I tell them exactly what happened, and I’ve told multiple people the same story so many times that I’ve basically memorised the script by now. One of my friends even asked if I had intentionally chosen an ugly design in order to be edgy and satirical — as if I would ever be so pretentious!

My cover up tattoo idea hasn’t been settled on yet, as I’m expecting the tattoo artist to help me pick a design once I arrive at the studio and they are able to see the extent of what they have to work with. Since the stick and poke is made of quite thin lines, I think it will be easy enough to cover with something that looks really good.