Second Tattoo

I got my first tattoo done about two years ago and talked about my experience here. It got me thinking on inking again. The same rules of What, Where, Who and When applied here too.

The 'WHO' was the easy part as I was sure I would want to get it done again at Dark Arts Studio in Bangalore where I got my first tattoo done and preferably from Satish Palan who did my first tattoo as well.

The 'WHERE' part was also almost pre-decided. If you read my first tattoo blog you will realise that I was thinking of getting the tattoo done either on my upper or lower part of the hand. Since the first one had been on the upper part of the hand, I decided that the second one would be on the forearm.

The 'WHAT' part got me thinking since I wanted the second one to mean something very personal. The first tattoo had been of Lord Ganesha as I had always wanted to start that way. The second tattoo's idea had already started germinating in my mind for some time. I wanted my family's names as a tattoo and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed awesome since the names were interlinked. My wife's name is Anindita or Ani for short, my daughter's name is Ipsita and my son's name is Tarush. If you look closely, as I did when I started thinking of a design, you can link them with Ani leading into Ipsita leading into Tarush or in other words AnIpsiTArush. So that was fixed. I wanted this to be an inner circle with the outer circle saying Beautiful Soul as these three were the beautiful soul of my life. Two concentric circles - AnIpsiTArush as inner and Beautiful Soul as outer.

The most difficult part was the 'WHEN' part as I just could not find the time in my busy schedule. In between travelling and family time, I was not able to take the required time out to visit Dark Arts. In the meantime, I had been speaking to my best friend, Sowmya Ramachandran, and getting her psyched to get a tattoo done as well. We had been discussing for quite some time about the possibility. 30th Nov was her birthday and we got discussing about the possibility of her getting her tattoo done on that day. I had a tentative appointment for her at Dark Arts and when she finally decided to get it done, I decided to accompany her and get my second one done as well. So the first tattoo was on Ganesh Chaturthi and the second one on my best friend's birthday.

When we landed up at Dark Arts, we got to Sowmya's design first. She wanted to get a Sun done and as she was being shown some designs, I got a chance to explain my 'concentric circle' design to Preeti. Sowmya quickly decided on a flaming Sun with a V (for Vedanth, her son) morphing into a R (for Raj, her husband) in the centre of the Sun. As I got discussing with them on my idea, we quickly realised that having so many alphabets in a circle may make it illegible. As Preeti showed me some fonts, we finalised on a beautiful cursive font which would give it some flair. The stencil looked good and we were set.

Sowmya's tattoo took a good hour to get done and it did pain a bit for her as she was getting it done right at the pulse area on her wrist. The end result is really good. Satish got started on mine after her's was done. And it took all of 2-1/2 hours to get it done. As I had mentioned earlier, this time too it wasn't very bad. There were moments when it did pain a bit but mostly it was like a small needle pricking you softly. After some time you sort of get used to it and it doesn't even register. At the end of 2-1/2 hours by 10.00pm, my tattoo was done and I had my second ink.

The tattoo is big, taking up almost 3/4 of the arm. I jokingly mention to people that now I can't even have an affair as the girl will ask whose names are those on your hand and when I tell her that its my wife and kids, I'm sure she'll disappear. :) But what better way to show commitment and love for my family than to have them tatto-ed on my body with the fact that they are the Beautiful Soul of my life!