I waited so long after my last horrific tattoo experience in 2014 to finally get the one I got last month. It was like a dam burst. All these ideas that I’d had swimming in the back of my mind for so many years flooded in. I’d kept inspo photos for years, tucked away in various corners of my files. Cat tattoos and spooky tattoos and silly tattoos. Pretty tattoos and interesting tattoos and unbelievable (aka patch) tattoos. Suddenly, I was organizing all those files into collections, labeled with the location I wanted to get them and screenshots from the artists I wanted to work with.

(I am so bad at taking selfies!)

There’s a chain of shops in town called Ink Couture. Every Thursday, they do a walk-in only Ladies’ Night where you can get a 3×3 tattoo for a discounted rate. Stephanie wanted to get her first tattoo and it fit the parameters of the event, so yesterday afternoon, I took her over to our closest Ink Couture location for Ladies’ Night. It turned out to be a slow night at the shop. The artist who came to meet us had been ghosted by her appointment, so she actually ended up taking my makeshift designs for a calf tattoo (that was slightly too big for the LN parameters) and tattooing us both.

My calf tattoo was actually the most recent thing I’ve thought of, a silly tattoo that combined my love of tarot with a lingering signature from college. In my second year of college, my mom sent me a box of those Valentine’s conversation hearts like she used to do every year. Those things are disgusting, but it was family tradition, heh. In 1999, the company introduced a new heart that just had a wide smiley face on it. This particular smiley face was only around for that one year, and it was a rare find. I loved it. I loved it so much that I bought a giant bag of disgusting conversation hearts just so I could pick out the four smileys that were in it and send one to each of my closest friends. And I began signing my letters – because I was still sending post letters regularly then – with a smiley heart.

In subsequent years, the smileys first disappeared, then returned as a smaller smiley inside a circle, then became a weird flirty smile with oblong eyes and creases on the smile ends. I can find photos of those two online, but I’ve never seen a photo of the original that only existed the one season. I’ve drawn it so many times, though, that I know exactly what it SHOULD look like. And as I was thinking about silly little tattoos I might do for Ladies’ Night after Stephanie and I decided to attend a few weeks back, I realized I wanted this little smiley heart. It’s not important, it’s not meaningful, it’s just a silly thing that I remember from college. And because it’s me, I decided to turn said smiley heart into the Three of Hearts from the tarot deck, in an ironic twist – to smile despite being stuck in the middle of the heartbreak card. I’d say it’s meant to be a reminder or some such nonsense, but it really isn’t. It just made me laugh and reminded me of the Everything is Fine Modern Witch tarot card hanging over my computer.

I chose to use the version of the Three of Swords from the Phantomwise tarot deck (done by Erin Morgenstern, inspired by The Night Circus) as a template. Most Three of Swords cards will show the heart pierced in a way that doesn’t allow room for a smiley face to show, but Morgenstern’s art provided a perfect empty tableau for the conversation heart portion. The smiley inside the circle on the more recent conversation hearts is mostly the right shape and proportion to itself, just needed to be bigger to match the 1999 version. I’ve said it before – I’m a terrible artist. But this is the rough sketch I came up with. (Heart itself was printed from online, which is the only reason the heart and its bottom shadow/sides are correct. I can trace mostly! Heh.)

The artist informed me that this particular tattoo would not work in the 3×3 parameters, because it would muddy up too badly over the course of a few years within that frame. I was okay with paying a higher rate, though, and said absolutely she could take this design and make it her own, as long as the smiley was right and the heart looked like a conversation heart. I’m no artist, and I want the true artist to take my idea and make it perfect! So she did. Quincy was our artist, and she turned my silly little idea into a silly little tattoo with her own twist on the design. It’s simple and effective, and one day I might get the heart shaded in one of the pale pastel colors of the candy. I laugh every time I look at this, because it’s just so incongruous, the smile and the swords, ha!

Three fun facts: 1) This is the first tattoo I’ve gotten on the right side of my body. My wrist and shoulder were on the left, my back tattoo was obviously in the center. 2) This is my first tattoo with any shading. All the others are line-work only. I still don’t have any with color, though I hope to change this soon! 3) Ink Couture had those gumball machines for flash tattoos, and I really want to play that game at some point!!