so now we're tattoo-married [wedding post the seventh]

by Mark Cook

Last week we suffered a minor crisis in wedding plans when we discovered that our tattoo artist, Ellen Murphy -- who has worked at Chameleon, in Harvard Square, for the past eight years -- would be relocating to New York City at the end of August to work at Red Rocket Tattoo. Suddenly, she was not going to be available on September 14th to ink our wedding tattoos!

Thankfully, my dad had just completed the calligraphy design for us a few days previously (see above), and so I phoned up Chameleon and booked us for this past Monday evening. Here are some photos we took of the process.

Ellen works on Hanna's ink

first the stencil gets applied

and then the ink, which on one's wrist is pretty intense!

I had mine done vertically; here it is moments after completion

Hanna told me afterwards that I turn some pretty exciting colors while I'm breathing through the pain; while I never felt nauseated or in true danger of passing out, I did feel a little lightheaded at times and Hanna reports my skin turned some exciting shades of white, yellow, and green. At moments like these, I'm grateful for all those adolescent menstrual cramps that hurt like a motherfucker and taught me how to breathe through the worst until it was all over. (Also kudos to Ellen for being in tune with how I was doing -- we got the work done efficiently, without me ever having to ask her to break.)

The finished pieces, well-greased with antibiotic salve.
(Anna on the left, Hanna on the right)

We figure this puts us well on the way to a long life of marital commitment.