How this book got written and why it took so long for me to get a tattoo!

One of the things I get asked most often is why did YOU write a book about tattooing. I certainly don't fit the mold of what you might think of as your average person who gets a tattoo.

I work for a major corporation in Finance and Human Resources and deal with lawyers, auditors, personnel directors and high ranking, power brokers every day. I'm not in my teens or my twenties.

Although I'm in the entertainment industry, you won't find a a more "corporate" crowd than the people in my end of the industry.

However, as much as I love what I do, Finance and HR is only what I do for a living. It has nothing to do with what I am as a person. Like most people, I have a creative side.

The people I work with in Finance are professional musicians, manage rock bands on the side, do interior design, etc.

You try crunching numbers all day, in an artist friendly environment. We've all developed outlets for our creative sides that have nothing to do with what we do for a living. (We try not to have a conflict of interest with our jobs.)

However, we have to have the ability to put on suit, and look professional.

So, when I decided I wanted a tattoo, I couldn't just go out and bare an arm and say, "put 'er there."

Three things prevented me from doing this. The first of course was the reaction of the people around me. I wasn't jeopardizing a well paying job for a tattoo.

The second was my own artistic ego giving me fits. I didn't want anything permanent that I hadn't designed. It meant, I wasn't picking flash off the wall, or letting a tattoo artist decide for me, even though I've seen people do that with great results.

The third thing that stopped me from getting a tattoo was fear. Hello, painful much?

So, I wound up speaking to a lot of people with tattoos, tattoo artists and looking at a lot of tattoo flash art. I confessed in "Before You Tattoo" that the first time around, I just couldn't let the artist do it. I, for lack of a better term, freaked.

So, I kept to temporary tattoos and henna tattoos for a while, before I was happy and comfortable enough with the tattoo I designed and the artist I picked, to finally get a tattoo.

And getting a tattoo was neither as traumatizing or as painful as you might think.

Along the way, I collected a a lot of research and information on tattoos, tattoo designs and their meanings, what the actual process was like, tips to make the process go smoother, after care for healing tattoos, statistics on people who got their tattoos removed, popular methods of tattoo removal, piercing and body modification (uh...that was actually collected for a different reason,) henna tattoos, designs and recipes, temporary tattoos, tattoo lingo, etc.

I kept all the tattoo information and interview notes I collected in a three ring binder, organized it by subheadings and before I knew it, over the course of a year, I had a book about tattooing.

It wasn't an intentional thing, it just happened. It kind of developed a life of it's own.

Since I'm not a tattoo artist, and had to look at tattooing from an tattoo enthusiast's viewpoint, I consider "Before You Tattoo" to be an unbiased source for tattoo information.

I have my tattoo, I may get more in the future, but I'm in no hurry. And I definitely want quality over quantity.

I'm happy with my tattoo.

And that's the important thing.