I don't have time to blog.

I don't have time to call my mother.
I don't have time to put away my laundry.
I don't have time to bury the bodies.

But I somehow have the time to get another tattoo.

But "another tattoo" is a bit of a misnomer because I'm just expanding the coverage of the one I got in March, which I had intended to be a tiny little thing on the back of my triceps. But the tattoo artist sketched out something that totally wrapped itself around the meaty part of my triceps in a shamelessly vain look-at-my-triceps kind of way and I loved it. At the time, she also traced what she might do to extend it up onto my deltoid. And I loved that too. So I went in tonight to have her complete the project. And now I'm sitting in bed with a dark gray towel draped over the headboard and tucked under my butt to catch blood smears and/or drips, blogging on my laptop, and wincing in pain every time I move my arm far enough for my fingers to reach the qwerty row of keys. Vanity is not pretty. But it is smeary.

Anyway, my tattoo lady likes her smokey treats and she took her first break after she outlined the new tat tonight. So I took a picture of it while I waited for her to come back. That purple line in the mirror—though irritating—is part of a larger tattoo-all-the-non-human-things-in-the-room theme that pervades the entire tattoo parlor. They even painted tattoos on the photocopy machines. So what can you do? But notice the dude in the bottom left corner of the pic. He was sitting there watching his Trixie girlfriend get a tattoo on her shin. But he left once the tattoo artist finished drawing on the temporary tatto and finally fired up the needle. Wimp.

Here I am fresh out of the shower and slathered in nourishing layer of A&D Ointment a couple hours later. My camera phone doesn't give me a very accurate preview of what all I'm photographing, so I had to crop the pic a bit once I saw everything I'd accidentally captured in pixels. Because this is not that kind of blog. (Hi, Mom!) But see how awesome the tat looks on my deltoid? I! Love! It! It is totally worth the pain ... and I'm talking about the pain to my person, the pain involved in washing blood out of my towels and sheets for the next week, and the pain I will cause my mother when she reads this post and has another coronary. (Hi again, Mom!)

If you'll excuse me now, though, I'm actually dripping blood. And even though it's landing on a dark gray towel, that can't be a good sign. So I'm gonna go slather on some more magical A&D Ointment and try to figure out how to sleep in such a way that my shoulder doesn't touch anything. It should be a long, painful, eventually-someday-worth-it night.