Tattoo

The weekend after Thanksgiving, I decided that I needed to apartment hunt. Ugh. I wasn't looking forward to it. I just moved 10 months ago and while I knew that Tuf was moving back to Texas for over a year now, I like to live in denial. Plus while I know I am here for another 2ish years I am not looking forward to paying for everything on my own. I am blessed that I have been given a job that allows me the opportunity to live on my own - but it doesn't mean I want too! The DC Metro area is relatively small, but there are many parts of it. Did I want to live in DC? Virginia? Maryland? I truly wanted to live in Virginia. But all my friends live in Maryland or NW DC, so I decided that I would either live close to work along the 16th street corridor or in downtown Silver Spring. After Tuf got off work, we went and saw 2 complexes in downtown Silver Spring. I was like eh, I guess they are fine. I lived in Silver Spring for 1.5 years and it was just okay, nothing special. But I still had time to find a place to live - so two complexes was all I needed to do that day. The next weekend I found a place to live! And in February I will post about my new pad. 

So, Tuf casually mentioned that since we were in downtown SS and close to the place where we got our nose pierced we should get the matching tattoos we have talked about for years. Yeah, sure why not! What were we going to do? I know we wanted the cardinal and the infinity symbol, but did we want a sunflower or the DC skyline? So, we talked to our tattoo artist and he came up with a beautiful design and we have identical tattoos on our left forearm. Tuf went first - cause I wanted to see what it would look like first. I was a little scared of the pain, but as most know this is not my first tattoo and I do have 10 piercings - so a tattoo should not scare me.

Who doesn't want to see some bloody gauze. No pain no gain...

Here is the tattoo! The cardinal is for our grandma. She loved the cardinal - it was her favorite bird. Our grandma is so much in us and so much part of our journey together. The cardinal also represents our time on the east coast, because we first lived in Virginia and the Virginia state bird is the cardinal. The cardinal is sitting on an infinity symbol - the infinity symbol is our cousin symbol. I am so thankful we did it. We had talked about it for years, and we actually did it. I love tattoos! I love that I can see it and I love that it means something because my other "rebellious" tattoo I can't see and doesn't mean anything to me.

During the healing process my cardinal looked like it had real feathers as my skin was flaking off - gross, but cool...