Every tattooed girl wants to look like a princess on her wedding day, right?

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Well, today I get the chance to introduce to you a girl, Laura aka Swamps, who is a wonderful tattooed girl and get the chance to dress up like the princess she is this year! Swamps will be bringing you, each month, her fun and frolics of being a tattooed bride.

I’ll let her introduce herself now..

“Sooo…let me introduce myself, you can all call me Swamps, the most important people do! My REAL name is Laura – yawn I know! The lovely Rachael asked me to be this year’s guest blogger as her tattooed bride to be. I jumped at the chance with a small squee of excitement.  So I thought I would take this opportunity to introduce myself to all of you lovely people. I am 23 (VERY soon to be 24 but lets not dwell on that), I am pretty tattooed, I have naturally different coloured eyes, and I have a super lovely and super handsome husband to be called Matt Bee.

We live in a relatively dull little town, in a teeny house that could be likened to something from Alice in Wonderland, with our three little kitties; Captain Rackham, and her mum who is confusingly named Babycat, and our newest addition and completely bald kitty Sprout. 

We are getting married on September 15^th 2013. I am (I think) the most unconventional of brides. Not in the sense that I look weird so to speak, but in the sense that I am reluctant to say the least. I cannot wait to marry my handsome boy and spend forever filled with happiness (puke). However, wearing a big massive frock and having lots of people staring at me telling me that I look beautiful is incredibly daunting, and makes me feel uncomfortable just at the thought. So sharing this experience with lots of other people will help me not hyperventilate so often and hopefully it may even be helpful for a few of you too.

I guess you probably want to know a bit about the happy couple. So here goes… We met over Myspace believe it or not. Matt Bee (or Eight Bit as I knew him then) did draws (check them out here they are really good) and I was admiring his ‘work’, maybe more in the direction of the work of his mother and father for creating such a perfect face. 

 We didn’t talk much but he used to see me out and about. Being as I thought I was totally punching above my weight (I have kissed a lot of frogs in my time) I never approached him. This is where the nickname Swamps first originated. Before he had chance to get to know me and my actual name, he and his friend Timothy had to give me some sort of label for when they were discussing me. They called me the Swampy Creature. I did look a little like an echo warrior at the time as I had huge dreadlocks, and a saggy big knit hat that was practically attached to my head at all times, and I wore nothing that wasn’t at least 3 sizes to big for me. If not a little offensive, when I did finally meet Matt in person it just kind of stuck, and he has called me Swamps ever since. 

Believe it or not for our first date we went on a week long holiday to Egypt, it seemed like the best way to get to know one another. If he could pull off a week long date on the other side of the world with me I knew he would be a ‘good prospect’. We have been together now for 3 and a half (very happy) years and finally this July just gone he did the deed and asked me to marry him.
It was approaching our 3 year anniversary so Matt said he would plan us a little trip. This struck me as a little odd as we don’t normally go to McDonalds for our tea on our anniversary, let alone on holiday. Anyway, he said he was going to book it all, and pay for the lot. I obviously was elated at this prospect so put my feet up and let him get on with it. Next thing I knew we were on route to Rome for a romantic weekend away. I made the fatal error of only taking one pair of shoes with me, jelly shoes, bad (very bad) choice. Turns out you have to walk everywhere in Rome. So while we were walking about 10,000miles around the city, my feet literally bleeding, Matt is secretly trying to get me to a spot in Rome he’s been to before where you could see the entire city, romantic hey?!? Well it would have been if I hadn’t moaned literally at every step to stop. So he ditched that plan and proceeded with plan number 2.
The next day we went to visit the Bocca della Verita. It is basically a huge face built into the stone of a church. Legend has it that you have to put your hand into its mouth and if you tell a lie it will bite your hand off. It’s quite the tourist attraction, so we stood in a huge queue waiting to get our picture taken with it. I asked the man who worked there to take our picture so we could both be in it. I went up to it all ready to pose, hand in mouth; not my mouth, obviously, that would be weird. Matt stops and looks at me and says ‘Do you love me?’ to which I obviously respond ‘yes’. He then waited for a second to see if it bit my hand off (imagine if it had, I would have been like uh oh!). When my hand remained fully intact he got down on one knee in front of hundreds of tourists and proposed.

They all clapped, I cried, and we all lived happily ever. The man with the camera took the photo at the exact moment he proposed so we have the perfect memory caught on film! So you can all see what a hopeless romantic he really is…..aww. 

I am the one that looks a little more tattooed than Matt. People tend to stare at me as I pass them in the street, and I have witnessed children being ‘punished’ for staring at me in supermarket isles. I have a large(ish) tattoo sleeve which is now a work in progress for covering up a much more rubbish tattoo sleeve that I had done as a naïve 18 year old. 

The slightly more rubbish tattoo may have involved what turned out to be backwards writing, it was believe it or not the right way round in the mirror – yes, I am THAT stupid! 

I also have a floral chest piece, which literally reduced my mother to tears at the time. 

Finally I have a couple of smaller tattoos, one of which is washing instructions on my hip.

Because I am not a ‘conventional’ bride I am trying my very bestest to channel some of our ‘weirdness’ into our wedding day. Along the way I shall be sharing my experiences with all of you lovely lot. That will be all the good, the bad, and the ugly.

My aim is to try and cover off a part of our wedding every month (if Rachael will have me that often), almost like chapters to planning our wedding.  Hopefully, I can provide you with some lovely ideas, I will share all the inspiration I used along the way too. In return I am hoping you can all provide me with the moral support I will need to actually be a super excited bride, instead of a super scared one.

I hope you’ve all had a lovely Christmas and New Year, here’s to a beautiful new bridey adventure.

Peace out, Swamps.”

How awesome is Swamps? Be sure to leave her your support in the comments below, and be sure to keep checking back for the latest in the sagas of a tattooed bride!