Inked

Almost every girl I knew who had a tattoo in high school had a butterfly. On their stomach, their hip, their ankle or the small of their back.. they all had a slightly different butterfly. So at 16 years old I was the ONLY girl I knew who had a tattoo that was NOT a butterfly.

I had a star.

Today it seems like the star has replaced the butterfly as the commonplace trend in symbology to be etched in ink on skin.

But back when I was 16 years old, stoned out of my mind in the tattoo artist's chair with my pants off (I knew I wanted it on my thigh), I chose a symbol seemingly out of the air. I wanted something that said, "Baby, there's no place but up from here", and I wanted the color to be a constant reminder of what it was I was getting away from.

I'm 22 now.. and that was 6 years ago, so the way I look at it. I started the bloody trend. So there.

In any case, I hid it successfully from my mom for about 2 years until I finally got the courage one day to admit I'd got one. She denied me the ink from the time I was 14 and told me when I was 18 I could do whatever I felt like. I was a rebellious teenager on drugs, but I don't regret it one bit.

Two weeks after I told her, we made an appointment to go get Mother/Daughter tattoos, and here's the result from that:

Obviously, I'm a Scorpio. She's a Cancer and got a crab on the back of her calf.

I have an idea for my next tattoo, but I need a budding artist to do the legwork with the drawings. Any volunteers?