My Tattoo ~ Celebrating My 50th Year

So …. The story behind my tattoo …when I first met Scott he had a tattoo … a huge parrot on his shoulder … yep, kinda like the pirates who carried real live parrot’s on their shoulders back in the day.  LOL  When Alayna was little she once asked Scott if his “parrot was an egg when he was a baby?”  LOL  Well my kids are now all grown, all of them have tattoos … all have more than one.  AND their spouses have tattoos.  So I kinda started feeling like I was a little left out.  LOL  So when thinking about this year and what it means to me …this year that I’ll be turning 50 years old (2 days after Christmas) … I decided it was MY time … time for MY tattoo.  I’ve never really wanted one before … oh there were times I kinda thought about getting a cutesy one on my boob or a heart or something else cutesy on one of my butt cheeks … yes, I thought about it.  Thought about it … that’s it.  And hidden from the world  LOL

                    

Well my kids all said tattoos should mean something so this made me start thinking … what do I really want to put on my body that is permanent …. Can’t take it back kind of permanent … something that means a lot to me and the answer came easily.  One my husband means a lot to me and two ... my three kids are my heart!  So I took it from there …

Sooooo … I decided on the letters OMMA … what do they mean and where do they come from?  Well when Scott and I started ‘dating’ some 27 years ago … he lived in Pennsylvania and me in Georgia.  A long distance romance full of  lots and lots of letters and many expensive long distance telephone calls.  Nothing to make it easy like today’s gadgets with text messaging, emailing or calling someone halfway across the country for free.  No …what we had was work and expensive! 

We met on March 2, 1984, and he ended his 7^th letter to me, on April 2, 1984, with OMMA.  His first visit to me was the weekend of April 12^th and when he drove across the Georgia State Line … he saw the huge billboard “Georgia On My Mind” … wow what a coincidence … he had no idea when he came up with OMMA that that was Georgia’s slogan.  So … it was “On My Mind Always” … OMMA for short … from then on … it was out little ‘word’ to each other when ending phone calls, saying goodnight, you get the picture … even during the 7 years we were divorced … when “I Love You” just wasn’t good enough.  You’ll understand what I mean by that if you’ve ever been divorced or if you’ve ever had a really nasty fight with your spouse … the one you love.  Sometimes ‘love’ just isn’t good enough … it takes a lot more than love to make a relationship work!  Love is just the basis … a very important basis, mind you, but it does not make a marriage alone.  Anyway … to answer a question you might be thinking ….YES, I do have every single letter that Scott and I wrote to each other in that year before we first married … several years ago for one of our anniversaries I put them in notebooks … there are 4 notebooks in all.  Kinda like the Nicolas Sparks book/movie “The Notebook”.

The second part of what is on my tattoo bracelet is a decorative heart on either side of my wrist … a Celtic Heart made up of 3 intertwining hearts … one for each of our children because they are my heart and intertwined into my soul.  They are the greatest thing I’ve ever created in this almost 50 year old life of mine!!!

Thirdly, the font is a Celtic font, why? because I am of Scot-Irish decent and I have a love for heritage!

So you see … this tattoo of mine does hold a lot of meaning for me … it had to …for me to be willing to put in permanent ink my love for my husband and our children. 

Did it hurt?  Well, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t … well the top part of the wrist and sides weren’t bad AT ALL … I was even thinking “what, people think this hurts?” … but when they did the underside of my wrist my tune changed to “WTH … it feels like someone is slitting my wrist with a razor blade” … literally … it was that painful …I kept looking down expecting to see blood gushing out all over the place …LOL (no, it didn’t bleed)… though I didn’t ask them to stop or give me a break … no I fought through it praying it would be over soon!!! And Lord forgive me if it is a sin to mar my body like this but between you and me … I know you know my heart!!!

P.S. When I got home Scott said to me "your Mama would have had a fit" ... I said "I know but then she would have thought about it" ... and then said "I think I'll get one" ... I can just hear her saying it!  LOL