T-Rav has good ideas. This is one of them, so here we go.
So Saturday morning, Meghan & I slept in. I eventually got up and went and got us coffee. The day before we had been watching some HGTV and contemplated painting the family room. We had made a plan to go buy some small cans of paint and do some test painting. At some point, we also decided on going to check out tattoo parlors, since we’d both been wanting newtattoos for quite some time. We’d been talking about it since well before our wedding, and it seemed like every time the idea came up there was something we had to wait for before we could do it. First the wedding, then the trip to Cancun, etc…
A couple of months ago, Ben told us he & Kerry had been thinking about tattoos and then they went and schedule appointments. Kerry’s appointment happens to be today. Anyway, sometime Friday night we decided we would finally go look at tattoo parlors and maybe make appointments.
So Saturday morning, after coffee, we got up and drove down to Ace Tattoo(warning: they also do nipple piercings) to check it out. We talked to one of the guys and got quotes for how much it would be etc… and I scheduled myself an appointment for Sunday. Yesterday. Yep. Hehe.
Saturday afternoon we ended up spending watching TV and then went out to dinner at Monte Carlo downtown, which is apparently Minneapolis’s oldest restaurant. It was certainly old, I’ll give it that. The food was okay. I had some slightly overdone cajun pork chops and a baked potato. They had Fat Tire on tap, which was awesome. Meghan had a tasty cheeseburger.
Anyway, Sunday we decided to go have breakfast at The Park Tavern and then watched more HGTV (whoops, we never did buy any paint) before going back to the tattoo parlor.
So Ace is in a little strip mall in Golden Valley right next to the New Hope water tower. It’s small, but clean, and the people are nice (and often funny). Somehow the guy who was to do my tattoo got double-booked, but since I was the one actually written on the calendar (and probably because the girls who were also booked for 1pm wanted dandelion and butterflytattoos), I got to go first.
So, after getting my leg shaved and bullshitting with the counter girl about Minnesota tattoo regulations and how they’ve changed over the last 13 years, I got to sit and do this for about 40 minutes.
People like to say that getting tattooed doesn’t hurt that bad. And it’s true, compared to having a limb torn off or having some spherical reproductive organ explode, it’s probably not that bad. Heck, compared to a moderate headache, it’s not that bad. But it does hurt. The last time I got a tattoo, I thought of it like a bee sting that just kept going. This time, it felt a little more like he was carving into my flesh (which I suppose is accurate, but it felt more like he was slicing my skin with a slightly dull knife that anything). Enough to make one wince, not enough to make one cry.
Anyway, the result is totally worth it.
If you are one of the many people in the world who does not know what that is, it’s the emblem of the Galactic Empire from Star Wars. This is the second in my series of evil empiretattoos (the first was a Klingon Empire tattoo on my left shoulder). Neither of the tattoo employees knew what it was. I suspect they thought it was some tribal design or something. If you’re wondering why I like to get evil empire tattoos, the best I can come up with is that they have cool looking emblems. I think the Rebel Alliance emblem is okay, but the Empire’s is much cooler. I think I also like the fact that most people don’t recognize it.