Tag Archives: bride diary

Miss Jo Black’s Tattooed Tales – The Proposal

She’s here! Marry Me Ink’s blogging bride of 2015 – Miss Jo Black! I’m a regular follower of @missjoblacktattoos and one day, I saw the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen appear in my feed. That’s where it all started. I contacted Jo and got her to enter her engagement story and Pinterest board to be Marry Me Ink’s new blogging bride. I’m SO glad she did – Jo and her fiance Leigh are due to get married at the end of the year with the most awesome theme I’ve heard of. This is where I now hand you over to Jo..

joleigh1

I guess this is my hello to the world of internet blogs and my first post as a “Blogging Bride” for the lovely folk at Marry Me Ink!

So… I’m Jo Black, or JoJo to my fiancé Leigh, I own and tattoo at a studio called Black Inc. Tattoo in the sleepy countryside town of Frome, Somerset… and that is exactly where and how we met.

Leigh, my bearded babe, came into my studio on a sunny morning with his son Finn to book himself in for a large tattoo on his back. He must have prepped Finn for their visit to impress me and the other ladies in he shop because Finn repeatedly told Leigh how much he loved him and what a great dad he is… come on what woman doesn’t melt when they know a man is a good dad! But anyway, after some time chatting about what he wanted and where, he and Finn went for a wander around Frome, when he left me and the other girls in the shop Alison and Neko joked that he was gorgeous and one of us could end up marrying him, I believe Neko’s words were “He’s RED HOT”.  A while later I went to get a round of coffee for the shop I noticed them waiting in line for milkshakes, I went over and chatted some more… And that’s where it all began.

pub

For the next couple of weeks leading up to his tattoo we spoke almost every day, joking and chatting via text and Instagram.  When the weekend of the tattoo loomed we had come to the decision that we just wanted to spend a bit of time together and instead of doing the tattoo we went to the Frome World Food Festival and ate and drank and fell in love! It took me almost a year to actually get round to tattooing him at all and still to this day we haven’t done the one he booked back then!

Two years on and Leigh and I are living together in a flat in Frome, with our dogs Spike and Bobbie and more in love than ever. My family adore him, and would probably rather spend time with him than me! And I adore his family too, he has rather a lot of family!

leigh my mum finn

So, with being so happy and on track, when we went to watch Funeral For a Friend play in the local venue just before Christmas 2014 and he started acting very strangely, ducking out here and there, whispering to people, taking phone calls and texts in private… I started to think something was up… I actually said to a friend that evening ‘I reckon he wants me to think he’s going to propose tonight and then he won’t do it’. That friend, who knew what was going on, laughed at me.

holiday Continue reading

SWAMPS’ POSTS: Sagas Of A Tattooed Bride – May

Happy May! How are we enjoying the glorious May sunshine?

As it’s May, it’s time to get straight in a see what Swamps has been planning so far! And here she is and it’s all about the hair & make-up! 

“So, April turned out to be a busy month for us on the wedding front. It has been SUPER exciting actually!”

We have done our invites which I can’t WAIT to show you! But being as they haven’t gone out to our guests yet I thought I would save them for next month. Sorry to keep you all waiting, but I promise you they’re super cute! It’ll be worth the wait.

One of the things we have done this month which has been MAJORLY stressing me out was the Mother of the Bride outfit. Who ever tells you finding your wedding dress is stressful, IGNORE THEM! That part was easy peasy in comparison to finding something your mum will like, well it was when it came to my mum. The bridal shops often assume that as a Mother of the Bride you’re like 110. We found everything was very old fashioned. After about 3 months of internet searching, and then a days shopping in good old Birmingham, we managed to try on about 60 dresses and came out with one that was FINALLY suitable. Lovely she looks in it too. 

Sooooo, once that drama was out of the way I got to focus on the Hair and Beauty side to my wedding. Now this I was super excited about. If you follow me on any form of social networking site you will know that I have a teeny weeny MASSIVE obsession with hair. You may have also noticed this from the pictures I include in each months blog that I have a different hair style every month. I am a girl obsessed! I think you can totally change the way you look with a hairstyle. Due to my completely overwhelming obsession with hair this was a major concern of mine.

I began my search for wedding styles on Pinterest, as you do! If you just google wedding hair you come out with some horrendous ringlet filled up do. There was absolutely NO way that I was going to allow someone to do that to me on my wedding day. I started by looking at some boho, messy styles. I L.O.V.E.D this one.

May - boho hair 1Source

It was Messy, which was a must – Neat is SO 1990s. I liked the uppy downyness of the style. Yes, I am aware I am fully making up words here but you get the picture. I also fell in love with the little floral head piece. My quest to make my hair look nice with the right headpiece was also a consideration of mine as I was searching.

As much as I loved this one I knew that the bits that were down at the front would drive me absolutely bananas if they were flapping around in my face all day so I knew that I needed something that was a bit more up than down. So next I found this little beauty. Continue reading

SWAMPS’ POSTS: Sagas Of A Tattoed Bride – March

It’s that time again, to get the juicy info from Marry Me Ink reader and bride-to-be Swamps! 

me (March)February’s installment was all about feeling like a princess when choosing her wedding dress, today it’s all about..

VENTURES OF THE VENUE HUNT

Hello lovely people, so glad that it’s blog time again. I hope you have all had a super romantic February. I spent my Valentines Day with Mr Bee (of course). We filled our faces with LOTS of Italian food, which is my absolute fave. There was a set menu with inclusive cocktails, and as Matt Bee doesn’t drink I drank them alllllllssss, which in my books is only ever going to be a good thing.

Sprout

So onto this months feature..

I changed my mind a couple of times as to what I wanted this months post to be about, so after much deliberation I fell back on the order that I started to plan my wedding in. Continue reading

SWAMPS’ POSTS: Sagas Of A Tattooed Bride – February

Today I get to welcome back Swamps, who has been on the hunt to find the perfect wedding dress!

I’ll hand straight over!

swampsWell, it’s that time again ladies (and gents, lets not rule anybody out) and I have been a bit stuck about what I should make my February post about. So as I sit here in my onesie, mounds of cats in tow and somewhat distracted by the snow outside and our newest additions to the family – the skinny pigs (they’re bald guinea pigs for those of you wondering), I begin by racking my (little) brains about what it was that I first thought about when I first got engaged. I figured it would make sense to write about the things I was most excited about when planning my wedding. So with this in mind February’s post will be all about the all important dress hunting, and very important it was too if not completely exhausting.

As a girl that dresses are relatively foreign to I was really nervous about wearing a big frock. My first port of call was to ask Matt Bee if it would be acceptable for us to have a fancy dress wedding. I figured if everyone was dressed up like idiots I would feel like less of a spectacle. Although he has an entire cupboard for dressing up he quickly decided our ‘Granny’ outfits wouldn’t really be suitable for our wedding day. Sadface. Continue reading