"She danced all night and all the way home": I love you... #25-28

#25

GET ANOTHER TATTOO

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

-Sylvia Plath (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts)

It's been about a year since I got my first tattoo. So I've been thinking about getting another one the last couple of months. I got my first one done after achieving something very personal to me and I got a design that symbolised both my journey to get there, as well as being something I found really beautiful and I have not regretted it for one second.

But now the big question is what next?

It took me months to decide on the previous one...The internet is filled with tattoo designs, quotes, fonts and placements of tattoos, but the most important thing to me is finding something that has meaning to me. Some of the designs and placements I have come across are truly beautiful...

I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night

- Galileo Galilei

I like the position of this one.

Really beautiful and I like the idea of a shoulder tattoo and it fits in with my recent dandelion obsession :).

I really like the font of the top one.

'alis volat propriis' is Latin for 'she flies with her own wings'. Beautiful.

'infragilis et tenera' is Latin for

'unbreakable and tender'

My body is a journal in a way. It's like what sailors used to do, where every tattoo meant something, a specific time in your life when you make a mark on yourself, whether you do it yourself with a knife or with a professional tattoo artist.

-Johnny Depp

This is one of my favourite Neil Gaiman pieces: Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

When the designs are chosen with care, tattoos have a power and magic all their own. They decorate the body but they also enhance the soul.

-Michelle Delio

I love the placing and wording:

'i swear we were infinite'

They keep track of time. Sometimes things happen and you feel that you need to mark them down.
-Scott O'Connor (Untouchable)

I really like the placement of these ones.

I did not make the decision to get a tattoo lightly, it is after all something that is going to be on your body permanently, so getting one done for the wrong reasons is stupid. So it took me almost a year to find the perfect design for my new tattoo, then I found out a girl at my gym had the exact same one done...true story. It's a sign...I need to keep looking. So this is the one I was planning on getting, exact same design and place...it's pretty, I know...*sigh*...

In my searchings for a new tattoo, I also came across the following story...

(via http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/this+is+on+account+of+my+loving+you+forever)

Beth Loster, 24, a San Francisco writer and waitress who was a student at UC Berkeley when she met a young man who said, “Hey, we have tattoos in the same font.”

The text of her tattoo - “clad in the panoply of love” - came from “Science & Health” by Mary Baker Eddy. “I like the way the written word looks on the body,” she said. “And that phrase made me feel safe.” His tattoo, also in a “typewriter” typeface, was in Latin. (She can’t recall the translation.)

The text of Loster’s next tattoo was written by that young man, who had eventually become her boyfriend. Before leaving for South America, where he was going to study, he left a note on her refrigerator that began, “this is on account of my loving you forever.” That phrase - in the form of a tattoo - offered her comfort when he was killed in a car accident in Brazil.

[A] genuine tattoo.... tells a story. I like stories and tattoos, no matter how well done, and if they don't tell a story that involves you emotionally, then they're just there for decoration, then they're not a valid tattoo. There has to be some emotional appeal or they're not, to my way of thinking, a real tattoo. It tells people what you are and what you believe in, so there's no mistakes.

-Leo, tattooist, 1993, quoted in Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription, 2000

#26

HAVE A PERFUME COLLECTION

So far, some of my favourites include After 5 by Fifth Avenue, DKNY's Pure (vanilla...mmm), Calvin Klein's Euphoria and Provocative Woman from Elizabeth Arden. Now I just need to find some more...and own them all at once :).

Wear perfume wherever you want to be kissed.

-Coco Chanel

#27

HAVE SOMEONE TELL ME I'M BEAUTIFUL WHEN I JUST WAKE UP IN THE MORNING

Heads up guys. This is one sure fire way of making a girl's knees weak. And we like to be called beautiful, not hot, just FYI. This might be difficult if my flatmate, James F's, reaction (a slight shriek of fright) first thing in the morning is anything to go by...I embrace crazy hair, ok...and sleep-creased cheeks...and puffy eyes...ok, I'm a mess in the mornings. At least I clean up good ;).

#28

SAY 'I LOVE YOU' MORE OFTEN

...and mean it.

Be a best friend, tell the truth, and overuse I Love You

Go to work, do your best, don’t outsmart your common since

Never let your prayin’ knees get lazy

And love like crazy

-Lee Brice

LOVE. The simplest of four letter words, it passes my lips a hundred times a day, 'I love this song, this dress, these shoes.' It's time for me to attach some meaning to it, to say it out loud to people in my life, to mean it when I say it, without assuming that they know that I love them.

In one of my favourite pieces, All That Lives Inside, Tyler Knott Gregson has a very visual and vivid way of telling someone he loves them.

All That Lives Inside

Have you ever wondered what you’d find if you took your two hands and placed them on my chest and with force, just enough force my love, pulled it apart and wide open?

I should spare you the gore and the stains on your perfect hands and tell you instead what would be discovered beneath this skin

and these creaking ribs that have fought so long to keep

the heartbeat inside and the pace slow.

Through the blood and bone and the broken breath of my battered body you will find so many things you never would have looked for.

I've no doubt in my mind that you will find the residue of our conversations and the fragments, the small remains of a lifetime of skipped heartbeats.

You will find the silhouette of shared kisses and sparklers in the late summer air. The breath that used to hang above your lips in the cold of morning and the moonlight and the sound of shuffling feet dancing beneath it.

Look, closer and ignore the red upon your fingertips.

Look, and find the sound of laughter under the covers and the way your hair smells fresh from a shower.

It’s there, and it’s covered with giant snowflakes that seem to fall inside me in slow motion and the flash of the lightning that struck me but spared me and left me alive to hold you.

Pull harder and reach and risk the scrapes on your knuckles from the jagged ribs that threaten your advance. Reach and find the space and invisible thread that connects the centre of your eyes to the centre of mine when we stare at each other. Find the words.

I promise there will be words and the ink will cover the red on your palms and you will never understand how many fit inside me, how many can come tumbling out. A magician you will swear I must be and words will be the scarf that just never seems to stop.

Pull and pull and get to the bottom of the words and find the last word that has been at the bottom of the pile since I started collecting them all in my chest. Find the word and smile that smile that only you can smile when you realize that word is, and was, and always will be You. You.

It’s there where it should be and it’s draped with the way your hand feels on my skin and the rattle of thunder against the walls, the raindrops on my skin. I will feel your hands, cold against the warmth inside me and you will feel the flapping of the birds and butterflies, their wings stirring the dust that collected in the time I spent waiting for you.

Feel them fly past the broken ribs and across your open palms and close your eyes as they create the breeze that will tickle your cheeks. Take your hands now, place them on my chest and find yourself ready and willing and more than completely able to discover and set free all that lives inside me.

-Tyler Knott Gregson-

When I say, "I love you," it's not because I want you or because I can't have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I've seen your kindness and your strength. I've seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are. You're a hell of a woman.
Spike to Buffy

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.