Tag Archives: Guest Posts

Honeymoon Tattoos – Laura & Tom

Posted on March 27, 2012 | 3 comments
Good afternoon! I hope you’ve had a splendid weekend? I certainly did at the Wedding Carnival, but that’s for another day!
Today I have a fabulous pair of honeymoon tattoos on such a wonderful couple!
You may notice Laura as Mrs Lou Pops or even the Bonfire Night Bride. Yep – They were married on bonfire night! How awesome?!! You can read more about the wedding over on Bonfire Night Bride, but I’m going to hand straight over to Laura now to talk about the tattoos she & Tom got whilst on their honeymoon!
Enjoy!
“Tom and I were married on November 5th 2011 at the stunning Danby Castle in North Yorkshire and we honeymooned on the Queen Mary 2 spending a week in luxury, crossing the Atlantic from Southampton to New York. We then spent five days in New York living it up at the Soho Grand and two days in Boston at the Nine Zero hotel on Boston Common. My husband and I are both BIG tattoo fans, mainly brightly coloured traditional style but we appreciate all good work. Saying that, I do also have some pretty crap tattoos too but we all make mistakes! We went travelling in 2009 and both had tattoos in San Francisco as a reminder of our amazing time away so we decided that from then on, any big holiday we have we’ll get a new tattoo and what trip away is bigger than your honeymoon?! 
We both adore the work of Valerie Vargas, based at London’s Frith Street Tattoos and so we used the links on her website to find an NYC based artist. If she’s a fan then that artist is good enough for us! We soon came across Sarah Schor at King’s Avenue Tattoo, a shop owned by the mind blowing Mike Rubendall, and we didn’t look any further. Her style is exactly what we love. We emailed the shop and they really couldn’t have been any friendlier and more helpful. We carried out all of our consultations via email and when the time came for our appointments what Sarah had drawn up for us was perfect! 

We both wanted something to resemble our wedding day so as it was a Bonfire Night wedding we both went for the phrase “remember remember” as a nod towards the 5th November. The book and inkpot on my tattoo resemble the wedding register. I wanted something brightly coloured somewhere only my husband would see it and as I have nice hefty legs, my right thigh was the perfect canvas for it!

Tom had a Statue of Liberty with blue eyes as my ‘baby blues’ as he calls them, are his favourite part of me!”

 

Aren’t they amazing tattoos? Leave Laura & Tom some love and be sure to swing by the Bonfire Night Bride site and read Laura’s updates! They’re fabulous!

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Red Gets Wed II – Guest Post [Tattoo Bride Blog]

Posted on March 1, 2012 | 5 comments

Eeeek! I’ve been wanting to share Part Deux with you for ages!!
Even before I was sent the text to support her tattoo.. I wanted to share the start to Red’s tattoo as soon as she sneak peeked me an image!

So on this wonderful Thursday afternoon, I’m going to hand you straight over to the lady herself.. Here the tale continues..

Every tat has a tale to tell. Skin can double-up as a birth or death register, provide storage space for a special memory or offer a canvas for that grand gesture. My latest addition definitely falls into the latter, but instead of wearing my heart on my sleeve it’s well and truly etched across my back! As you may remember from my very first guest post on Marry Me Ink last December, I was the girl blethering about my plans to physically narrate a very special time in my life with a wedding tattoo! So, the marvellous Rachael kindly invited me back to spill the ink on my latest session with the needle…

After three months of eager anticipation (and frantic saving) my three hour appointment in the chair with Captain Kev Younger of Lucky Cat Tattoo Parlour happened one drizzly Saturday afternoon in February. Stepping foot into the decadent parlour was like hitching a lift with Bill and Ted in their excellent phone booth, landing somewhere between the renaissance and early twentieth century Japan, all with a touch of Parisian opulence thrown in for good measure! Confused? Let’s just say the decor was more than a little impressive. Greeted by a collection of Maneki Neko’s (or ‘Lucky Cats’) beckoning me with their friendly little paws as I entered the grand reception area, the adrenaline and excitement really kicked in, stimulated further by the luxurious red colour adorning the walls.

After the necessary form-filling was finished and en route to where the magic happened I rubbed the big-bellied Buddha at the door for luck and wished with every bone in my body that this wouldn’t be sorer than any other time I’d been drawn on.

I’d only seen parts of my design over email so wasn’t really sure how my ideas had transpired on paper, but straight away Kev suggested he transfer them onto my skin to see how the pieces would fit together. Half an hour later and the result literally took my breath away! Not only did I love it, but he’d somehow managed to take my confused and rambling explanation of what I wanted (which went something like this: “errrmmmm, I’d like it to be feminine, and have lace and birds, and be feminine…and, errrmmmm….”) and design something more perfect than I ever thought was possible from my garbled imagination.

Not to be overly sycophantic here, but Kev epitomises the definition of ‘cool’. His eclectically dapper exterior lets you know he takes what he does very seriously, but it’s certainly not a case of style over substance. An old school gentleman at the core, he was once described in a newspaper article on tattoos as ‘quiet and intense’…mesmerizingly mellow, I’d go as far to say. His gentle voice and calming eyes makes you feel that you’re in a safe place as his customer – something that’s so important when putting your precious skin in hands holding a very scary needle!

And knowing his hands house the actual digits that tattoo Scotland’s most talented (and hottest) music export, Simon Neil, was almost too much for this humungous Biffy fan to handle (*swoon*)! Which better fine line artist to etch my favourite lyrics (“Nothing lasts forever, except you and me” Mountains, by Biffy Clyro) onto my back? I just about managed to contain myself. Well, except the part where I nearly weed at seeing Simon’s signature sprawled on the wall after his last visit only a fortnight previous…

Being the world’s biggest wuss, I brought along my lovely friend Caz to distract me from the buzz and the burn, and she more than lived up to her duties. Two and a half hours, a lot of random banter (and delirious chatterings in my pained state), and a fairly numb arse later, I had the bulk of the prettiest tattoo I ever did see, done!

Was it sore? F*ck yes! But was it worth it? F*CK YES! I’ve got another two hour sesh booked in for the beginning of April (he’s a man in demand) and I can’t bloody wait to get this bad boy shaded.

The beauty below is my attempt at signifying the immeasurable and all-consuming love I have for the remarkable man I plan to marry in six months time.

 

In our eight years together he’s already done more than most in the better and worse, richer (less of this bit) and poorer, sickness and health, times. No amount of ink could show him how insanely thankful I am to be in his life.

Love you to Jupiter and back beb.

So, what’s the story behind your own little piece of uniqueness, I’m literally itching (well, my back is!) to know? 🙂

Red xo

 

 

 

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Red Gets Wed – Guest Post [Tattooed Bride Blog]

Posted on December 2, 2011 | 12 comments


Today I bring you something MAJOR!

Today is the day I get to introduce you to one heck of a lady!
It’s amazing how social networking plays such a HUGE part in connecting with potential ideas for posts and people like this lady..

A gorgeous bride-to-be whom goes by the name of RED. We got chit-chatting through Twitter – and there an online friendship began. From the red of her hair to the tips of her high-heels, this lady is not one to be missed. Red has her own pre-wedding blog where she posts about all of her wedding goings – over at Little Red Briding Hood. From her surprise bridal shower to visiting wedding fairs with her H2B, Red has quite a knack of making her wedding planning experiences into an epic story land!

As we got chattering more & more, Red stated she had a proposition for myself as the Marry Me Ink lady.. “I know it’s usually inked brides that are your bag petal, but how would you feel about a bride to be guest blogging for ya, GETTING body pretty?”.. Seriously – I SQUEALED with excitement! I had never been so excited about a proposition before!

With that in mind, here I shall hand you over to Lady Red herself.. Enjoy my lovelies!


“Search for ‘wedding tattoos’ on t’internet and a plethora of laser removal firms and clever cover-up creams saturate the screen. It seems us decorated brides are expected to hide our pride and joys for walking down the aisle. So why the hell would a girl book in for a beast of a back piece six months before her big day, one may ask? Because inked brides kick conventional ass, that’s why! 

Let me introduce myself before I babble any further. My name’s Red, I’m engaged, and I’m a tat-addict. Admiring the designs of beautiful, strong women has been a favoured past-time of mine since I was old enough to legally bear the needle myself. Like many admirers of embellished skin, I was lured into the world of tattoos with the appeal of expressing my tortured teenage soul through body art. A decade later, and through the other side of my adolescent angst (thank feck!), my love for the tattoo has sustained and blossomed. 

It’s strange to think that up until the 90s, tattoos, especially on the female form, hovered on the periphery of society. It wasn’t socially acceptable for women to lay their inked skin bare, often considered ‘unladylike’, and associated with society’s rebels, namely biker chicks and Vegas strippers. The industry was very much a man’s world. But in 1993, Jennifer Leroy graced Playboy’s centrefold showing off a visible tattoo to readers (does one ‘read’ Playboy?) for the first time, and by the end of the decade, artistic flesh really came into mainstream culture for women. Celebrities jumped on the inked band wagon, with one feisty female in particular rebelling against the tattoo taboo by publically displaying her ornate designs on the *shock horror* red carpet! The delectable Angelina Jolie, who surely is the source of every girl crush across the world, declared her love for Billy Bob Thornton via flesh. And while I’m not a huge fan of the a-lister’s choice of tattoo designs, I’m eternally grateful to her for igniting my initial curiosity and subsequent fascination of needle to skin which now features so heavily in my life.

 

Source: http://www.tattoovirtual.com

 

But even now, when many tattoo artists admit that more women grace their chair than men, us girls often tend to go for the dinkier designs. Stars, dolphins, foreign lettering, flowers….for some, a discreetly diminutive motif is the desirable, but for others (me included) once we dip our toe into that vast pool of ink, we graduate to the grander scale of pieces. And that’s where my journey has taken me. From losing my tat virginity aged 18 with an ickle rainbow on the bottom of my leg (because clearly my preferred choice, the ankle, would’ve been far too sore so I opted for a more meaty surface area) when I was petrified of needles, to my ambitious plans for a seventh in honour of my immense love for my future husband – I’m officially hooked!

When all I had was a mere rainbow and cluster of dark stars in my late teens I remember clarting on the aforementioned tattoo concealer as bridesmaid for my Mum, scared of the elders casting their disapproving peepers over my ‘ruined skin’. Not that it did much good as clearly these chemists haven’t quite cracked covering-up solid black ink! But for my own wedding the story couldn’t be more different. When I met my hubster-to-be eight years ago, not to over-share here, but he was totally turned on by my rocky edge and sprawling tattoos.  Unfortunately, despite my continual pestering, his appreciation of tattoos ends with me and he’ll forever be an unmarked canvas. So I’m having this back piece for the both of us…to represent our journey up til’ now, and the amazing days that lie ahead growing old together. 

Photograph of one of my six tattoos, my guardian angel.

The icing on the wedding cake is that I’m being inked up by none other than Kevin ‘The Captain’ Younger of Lucky Cat Tattoo Parlour (Glasgow). The reason it’s such an honour is because this legendary creator of amazingness is Simon-actual-Neil’s – lead singer of Biffy Clyro and all-round music marvel – tattoo artist of choice who’s covered him head to toe in envious tats. The mere mention of my hero and ultimate crush Mr Neil (sorry fiancé!) turns me into a sweaty mess. From the moment my roommate played me the song Questions and Answers in our first year of University many moons ago I’ve pretty much morphed into arguably one of their biggest fans. *Geek alert* dare I admit that only today did I pimp my new ride with a ‘Mon the Biff’ superfan sticker! And it’s their entire repertoire that’s filtered through my headphones while doing this post (a required writing ritual)! Not to mention the fact that Scotland’s greatest export penned one of the most gorgeous lyrics ever written, providing the focal point for my new tattoo…

“nothing lasts forever, except you and me”

                                                                                                Mountains, Biffy Clyro (Only Revolutions)


L-R Simon Neil (Biffy Clyro) with tattoo artist Kevin Younger (Lucky Cat Tattoo Parlour)
Source: Miss Frenchie via Frenchie Ooh La La


So on 4 February 2012, after three hours of needlework (does it ever get any less sore…?) a little piece of ‘us’ will be imprinted on me forever. Not in a creepy, werewolf/Twilight way (!!), but in the kind of way that shows a boy how much his girl loves him. And with the world’s bestest wedding blogs now proudly presenting beautified brides in all their tattooed glory – Marry Me Ink at the fabulous forefront – what better time than to shun the camouflage and keep on covering bare skin with art.

Can’t wait to share my wedding tat with all you deliciously decorated ladies. So til’ then just remember, tats are for life, not just for Christmas!

Red xo“

SEE!! Isn’t see AMAZING?!!!!  Leave Red lots of love! She is one fantastical lady! – Rach.XX

 

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