My palms were sweaty and I could feel my muscles tensing up. I sat on the stool with my bare back exposed to the artist.  I was anxious, uneasy, and apprehensive.  My nerves took hold of my body and that’s when I first felt the cold, sharp needle hit my skin.  The pain was unbearable for the first fifteen minutes.  It felt like a cat’s claw dragging deep and far down into the lower end of my back, along with a bunch of safety pins poking in and out of me.  The burning sensation deep down in my skin was spreading the ink to every inch of shape that the stencil took place of.

I couldn’t help but grab my best friend’s wrist and hand and squeeze so tight, never letting go.  I needed a desperate release of energy from the other end of my body because most of the energy was at the opposite end.  I even started to bite my brown-and-blue-patterned scarf during it all.  My face become hot — well my whole body was on fire — and my cheeks became rosie red.  Twenty-five minutes passed and the pain started to become bearable.  My body picked up a sense of habit, realizing what was finally going on.

My body, at 18 years old, was experiencing the feeling of getting its first tattoo.

I wanted to fight the pain, and I did.  I knew that the pain would only be about forty minutes total, but I realized that this piece of artwork would be on me for the rest of my life.

The tattoo that I chose to get was a crescent baby blue moon with three black stars around it.  The meaning of it comes from my mother’s saying, “Shoot for the moon. If you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”  I grew up around this quote and it means a lot to me.  In life, whenever you make a mistake or you want to reach an extraordinary goal and you try so hard, but you fail, something or someone will always be there to catch you if you fall.

It’s scary and nerve wracking now to think about what is on my body will actually be there for the rest of my life.   I now wake up everyday to see the picture imprinted on my body, and I couldn’t be happier.