The quest started roughly 8 years ago. Attending art school together with punk, goth and other alternative folks does that to you.
If my head shape were suitable for it I'd probably have sported a 'hawk at some point. Given that it doesn't I resorted to changing my hair colour and length in regular intervals (for the record: it's short and platinum blonde at the moment with some teal streaks).

Anyway... for a couple of years I knew I was going to get a tattoo at some point, just could not decide what and where. I would definitely not walk into a shop, pick something random off the wall and get that done. For a while I was looking into getting a phoenix, but you see those far too often for my personal taste.

A year ago then I realised that a particular animal always makes me smile whenever I see it in a pet shop, it reminds me of my teens, when my father was still alive and we had a house full of aquariums. Of all those fish we had those were my favourites: the betta fish, also known as siamese fighting fish.

I collected a couple of reference photos, made some doodles but was never quite satisfied. Sure, I could have walked into a tattoo studio with those and asked the guys there to come up with something... looking through my watch list here I got a better idea though. Being an old Art Nouveau fan and as such madly in love with the stuff =Ysa does I contacted her with my idea and eventually commissioned the design. Here it is, the only difference will be that the bubbles are changed to be slightly more tattoo-friendly:

Today I walked into the tattoo studio that was recommended to me with the mostly finishe design to see what they think. Thy really LIKED the design ("Where did you have that done?"), but the general conensus was that it is far too detailed to go onto the intended location on my body (left shoulder cap) and we all agreed that simplifying it further was no option. Craptastic. Now what?

My first of hopefully only two three hour sessions has been booked for the 30th of this month. The fish will reside between my shoulder blades instead now, taking up an area of 7.5" x 7".

Man, this is gonna SUCK big ol' hairy donkey balls. I agreed to that WHY exactly?