Wednesday, July 18, 2012

every day is an adventure

The dude and the Kid are in Vegas for some basketball thing and for some reason, in addition to eating pita chips and/or instant mashed potatoes for every meal, I decided that I needed to get a tattoo.

I woke up this morning, decided what I wanted, printed it out and headed downtown. 

I had originally intended to go to one shop, but I couldn't find it (because I am a hopeless navigator), so I decided to find the second one on my list, which happened to be located deep in the wilds of the Long Beach ghetto.

I finally get to the shop, get introduced to the artist who will be permanently marking me and he tells me he's going to finish his lunch, then draw up the design and it will be a few minutes so I take a seat in the lobby.

I sit down and start flipping through a 2-year-old lifestyle magazine (because the other options were motorcycle magazines and magazines about growing pot) and the only other person seated in the lobby asks if I know what I'm getting or if I still have to decide.

I'm not the best at reading social cues, but I can tell that she wants to chat about her tattoo so I tell her that I already have mine picked out and ask if she knows what she's getting.

"Yeah, I have a pussy tattoo that I have to get fixed."

"Oh?" is really all I can think to say.

"It's a tattoo of my wife's name."

She goes on to tell me how her wife has asked her for a divorce and how she's never getting anyone's name tattooed on her again and how she's just going to sleep with as many girls as she possibly can. She's getting the tattoo of her wife's name "Diem" turned into "Carpe Diem".


.. I've seriously known people for decades and had less intimate conversations with them.

Thankfully, she gets called back by her artist and I'm off the hook.

My artist eventually calls me back and within a few minutes, I'm on his tattoo table wearing an artfully placed sheet in place of my shirt (because the shirt I decided to wear was not conducive to my artist being able to do his work - normally, I'm way too modest for something like that, but he had endeared himself to me with a well-timed "that's what she said" joke, so I was comfortable).

Suddenly I look up and there she is holding out a piece of paper. "Here's my number, call me and we can hang out some time!"

She leaves and my artist makes a remark about how friendly she is. I recount a bit of our conversation for him and mention that she now has "Seize The Day" permanently inked on her crotch.

"Wow," he says. "She's really friendly..."

Also, as it turns out, the creepy downtown area wasn't half as scary as I thought it - the crackheads were extremely polite and half the guys walking down the street either whistled or called me "cutie"... of course, all of that might have just been because I was a terrified-looking white girl, clutching my purse and looking very lost.

Also, here's part of my ink (and my extremely pale skin)