Tattoos

      Today we are going to talk about tattoos. To me, tattoos are beautiful pieces of body art and a wonderful form of self expression. There are people still who feel that tattoos are disgusting, make the wearer a criminal or a tramp, and have nothing but terrible things to say about them. I am pretty sure none of those people read my blog though. Unless they come here just to judge me. 

      Yesterday I talked about Dani Boiko's new doll with the rolled up sleeves. Such a simple little change that made me extremely happy. Dani also asked when she ordered the doll, if I would be OK with her giving the doll a tattoo when she got her. Um, yeah! Right after I sent her the approval photos we got to talking about tattoos. First for her doll, then I had an idea, and then we talked tattoos a bit in general. Let me say, it can be extremely hard to take a photo of a tattoo that is on your own body! This is the oriole Ethan put on my left forearm. 

And this is the little blue bird that I put on my doll, since I thought Dani's idea was amazing!

These are the clematis flowers Ethan put on my left forearm (they are near the oriole)

And these are the similar flowers I put on my doll. 

This is the incredibly cool tattoo Ethan put on my right forearm. I said I wanted flowers and swirly stuff that looked kind of like leather tooling. And he drew this. I loved everything about it (still do). 

This is the not really at all similar tattoo I put on my doll's right forearm. 

This is the swirly butterfly Ethan designed and put on the inside of my left bicep. 

This is the somewhat similar one I put on my doll on the inside of her left forearm because if I put it on the bicep it would not be seen since she is in a T-shirt. 

      This started as a neat idea that Dani had. She just wanted to put a tattoo on her doll, which I fully support. Then when we were chatting about what she should do I remembered all of my nail art designs. And I told Dani I had a really great idea on how to tattoo the doll, put some on mine, and showed her photos. Dani said that tattoos are completely underrepresented in doll scale. And I agree. So Ellie got a bunch of tattoos. And I am pretty sure I will be tattooing more dolls in the future. 

     While there are people that still feel that getting visible tattoos makes you unemployable, I feel that tattoos are becoming pretty mainstream. I work at a school and I am not the only person there with visible tattoos. I am not the only woman there with visible tattoos. And I don't mean just cute little ankle butterflies. One kid this summer, in the high needs program, gently touched one of them. Clearly he wanted to know if they felt different. The kids seem to think they are cool, ask about them, then sort of forget they are there. My tattoos are just another part of me. A pretty cool one, if I do say so myself.