It started with a stopmotion.

And the final product was two matching tattoos.

I’ll start this by saying I never expected I would get a tattoo, and I will continue by saying I am so happy I did.

I actually don’t know where to go after that.

Mar and I have been best friends for fifteen years this Memorial Day. Last year, six days after I turned eighteen, on a Sunday night, I was watching the video of Alexis Mire getting her tattoo and it kind of just hit me that I was allowed to do that now. Immediately, almost as one thought instead of two, I thought, Mar. And I called her and she was on board. We spent the next three months on dafont.com, trying to find the perfect quote and font, staying up late and drawing the tattoos on our bodies, trying to find the perfect spot where they would lie on our legs. We called each other and texted each other incessantly. It was all we could talk about. We chose a quote, we chose a font – and then chose another font, and we chose a date.

At first we just said we needed a line from a song we had seen live together. (We go to concerts together. It just is.) And we were throwing those around and nothing seemed fitting to have written on your leg for all eternity. Finally I pulled up the stopmotion we had made so many months before and listened and the line “in the daylight, anywhere feels like home” was concrete even before I had to say it to Mar. I just knew, the same way I knew when we first listened to Daylight when we were trying to find the perfect song to use for the stopmotion. I chose it for my own reasons, too, for reasons that are hard to explain verbally when someone asks why. But this is why:

So we stayed up late finding the perfect font and we told our parents and they got angry and we decided to keep on with it.

After midnight on New Year’s, I called Mar during the song from the Matt & Kim concert. She couldn’t come, but when we first started we said we wanted it to be from a song we heard live together and so it was.

(tinsel coming down during the song, January 1, 2012 – my phone, with Mar on the other end, listening in)

Up until the moment the needle first burned my skin, I didn’t know whether we were actually going to do it. Not when I called and made the appointment, not when I met up with Mar and Bri and Cara the morning of, not when I won the coin flip to go first, not when we were signing the contracts and not even when I was sitting down in the chair.

(before)

(during)

(Mar’s)

(after)

It hurt like crazy, but at no point did I think to myself, I want to stop. At no point since have I thought to myself, I regret this.

Maybe I will in twenty years.

For now, my best friend and I have matching tattoos, and for now, I am happy.

love,

Caiti

P.S. huge thanks to Monkey Boy at Freehold Tattoo, who did our tattoos for us. I think he was amused by the two silly teenage girls getting (relatively small) tattoos for the first time.