Good heavens. Has it really been six weeks? That is approximately 36.3 years in Tien-time. So let’s catch you up quickly:

Looms: Unpacked, moved, and reassembled. Amazing Grace (my TC-2 loom), being the queen of the household, has the bedroom to herself; Lady Lovelace (my brand-new Megado) and I are shacking it up in the living room. I haven’t had time to do anything with either loom – most of the past six weeks has been spent unpacking and assembling looms.

But not all. Other interesting things are happening as well, most notably that I’m currently in a plane above the South Pacific, heading to Australia to get a tattoo.

Well, yes, I suppose that is just about what you’d expect from me.

To explain a little more:

Ever since I got a phoenix tattoo on my right arm (after my mother passed away, I left high-tech to teach weaving, and my then-husband came out as transgender), I’ve wanted a tiger on the left arm. I’ve had an affinity for tigers for quite some time – my original website, started in 2003, was at travelingtiger.com – but I didn’t feel the idea had quite gelled enough to manifest yet. I also didn’t feel that I had “earned it” yet – a tattoo of that significance should be a celebration, a capstone to some achievement or significant event, rather than something to just go out and get one day after dinner.

Well. After the past year of upheaval – the end of a 20-year relationship/15-year marriage, selling the house we’d lived in for over a decade, cocooning in Mexico for three months, and finally deciding to move back to San Jose to start over – I think I’ve earned another tattoo.

I didn’t want just a plain tiger, though. There are lots of “regular” tiger tattoos in the world, and I wanted something special – something unique and with deep personal significance.

So I had a long conversation with ChatGPT about what this tattoo might look like, and we came up with this (two slightly different ideas of the same concept)

The tiger is walking from the spirit world into our world, and represents strength, confidence, and self-control – powerful but not aggressive. The panther is the tiger’s Jungian shadow-self, following a few steps behind (as the shadow-self always does). As the tiger walks through the spirit veil, the panther is just visible, beginning to manifest, behind.

Together, they are about finding and manifesting your power, and integrating your shadow-side into your self, so you can move together as a whole and much more powerful person.

I REALLY liked this tattoo idea.

But finding a tattoo artist turned out to be incredibly difficult. The better tattoo artists, like all artists, prefer to create their own work to tattoo, rather than tattoo artwork created by others – in fact it’s generally an incredible faux pas to ask a tattoo artist to tattoo someone else’s design or to ask them to design for someone else to tattoo. This is exactly as it ought to be, but it does mean that your tattoo artist needs to be able to draw whatever design you’re contemplating.

Also, tattoo artists, like artists generally, usually specialize in a particular visual style – greyscale realism (realistic tattoos made with only black/gray ink, no color), watercolor (bold use of color, more flowing style), blackwork (bold black lines, like my phoenix), fine-line (single needle), among about 40,000 others.

Within a style, most artists also specialize in a particular subject, e.g. detailed botanical studies, owls, legendary animals, Chinese watercolor landscapes, manga and anime characters – the list is pretty much endless.

The challenge with this tattoo is that it crosses several different genres. The incredibly detailed tiger called for grayscale realism combined with color. The mist required skill with flowing color, with a Chinese landscape painting sensibility. The two put together required an artist who could do not just a single subject (such as the tiger) but an entire composition.

On top of that, tigers in action are pretty complicated to draw. Not stationary tigers – the world is paved in tattoos of tiger heads, and there are lots of photos to use as references. But to draw a tiger walking naturally, you have to understand more about feline anatomy and movement, and there are really very few tattoo artists who have enough experience to draw a truly beautiful and realistic walking tiger.

After coming up with the concept sketch, I spent about two months trawling Instagram (where pretty much all tattoo artists put up their portfolios) searching for the right artist. I was delighted when I found an artist who I thought could do the work – and she was in Berkeley! I sent her my design, turned up for a consultation, and scheduled an appointment.

But.

With tattoos, you typically get the design a few days before the session, even if you made the appointment months in advance. Nobody’s explicitly said why, but I suspect it’s to discourage clients from making four thousand revision requests before the day. Which is reasonable but makes for a rather suspenseful time for the client – you don’t know if you’re going to like it until a few days before the appointment.

And, as it turned out, I didn’t. What I got appeared to have been poorly drawn by AI – a tiger with dog-like paws, spots rather than stripes on the back, and a weirdly misshapen spine. I sighed and emailed the artist to cancel the appointment.

At that point I was down to two artists, both based out of Seoul. (A lot of the best tattoo artists, particularly in blackwork – my favorite style – come from South Korea, which is ironic because tattooing is actually illegal there.) Both specialized in tigers, but Forest got the nod because she did more complex compositions – you can see them on her Instagram feed. When I found out she was doing a guest artist residency in Melbourne, Australia right now, my decision was made. I emailed her and bought tickets two days later.

My flight is about to land in Australia. I’m giving myself two days to rest up before the tattoo; I didn’t want to go into it jet-lagged and exhausted. So while I arrive late Friday night (Australia time), tattooing doesn’t start until Monday. I don’t have any particular tourist plans; this trip is a pilgrimage, or perhaps more accurately a capstone to twenty years of my last era, and a bold step into my new phase.

Here’s my final tattoo art, and a mockup of how it’s likely to look on my left arm. I hope you love it as much as I do.