My First Tattoo!!!

Squeeeee! I am so incredibly happy with my first tattoo! It's based on the Chrysina Gloriosa, a beautiful green scarab beetle that lives here in Arizona, and it was inked on to my back by Muriel Zao, who is completely awesome. He studio is lime green and has a curio cabinet full of skulls and insects, so I was pretty much destined to love her, but she also had a great attitude and a good sense of humor, which helped me be really relaxed about the fact that I was getting my first tattoo and it was not a little bittie thing (although it's not as big as it looks in the pic. It appears to take up half my back, but it is actually about the size of my hand).

This is just the first part of the tattoo, in a few months I will be going back to get some foliage spreading out from the beetle over my hips, because hip tattoos look amazing on belly dancers. And I'm already daydreaming about what I'll get after that. There's so many beautiful insects in the world! Will I get another beetle? A sphinx moth? A cicada?

I am really happy to say that I found the whole tattooing experience to not be as painful as I feared. I had a full and eventful day after my appointment, visiting with several of my Phoenix-area dance friends, dropping into Plaza real quick, and then I came home and ran through the Fire & Gold choreography, because every day means every day!

Now to see how I feel in the morning ;)