On Tattoos - Part 1: "Estel"

Fun fact: I have three tattoos.

Actually, I've wanted a tattoo since I was 14. It started off with the desire to get a butterfly tramp stamp tattoo. Not entirely sure why, but I'm glad my high school boyfriend told me I wouldn't survive the pain, so I didn't push through with it.

It then evolved into a desire to get a Dogtown logo tattoo coz I was known as "Zephyr girl" during my college years (yes, I was a skater girl).

But it wasn't until after I gave birth - it was a natural birth, by the way... without painkillers - that I thought, "If I survived that, I'll survive getting a friggin' tattoo!" :p

So, when my good friend Kays told me she was getting a tattoo, the crazy spontaneous girl in me decided to get one, too. Thus the birth of tattoo number one.

I still lived in Bangkok when we got our tattoos, so we went to Mah Boon Krong (MBK), one of the cheapest malls in the city, for them. We really only had one choice: P' Malakor. He already did a lot of our other friends' tattoos, so we knew we could trust him.

Yes, that's a pink hoodie. Yes, those are pigtails. And yes, I'm smiling. Coz getting a wrist tattoo is ticklish as hell. I don't know what my high school boyfriend was on, but it definitely didn't hurt. At all.

What did I get? Well, I wanted to get something that reflected me and my personality as a whole and something I was passionate about, so...

I got a tattoo in Sindarin (Elvish, for you non-geeks).

Why? Well, for starters, "The Lord of the Rings" is the first geeky thing I ever got into - even way before the movies came out. I actually even learned how to speak Elvish at one point coz I'm just that geeky.

I even wore an Elvish crown to school sometimes and called myself Princess Estel coz "estel" was my favorite Elvish word. This explains why I was loner. :p This also explains why I got the word "estel" as my first tattoo.

"Estel" means "hope", by the way.

The reason why I'm so fond of the word "hope" is because I've always felt that nothing is more important in life than having something to hope for and something to believe in. Don't you agree? I mean, I don't know about you, but hope is basically what keeps me sane to this day. Well, hope and David Bowie. But it would be a lil weird if I had a tattoo of Aladdin Sane, wouldn't it?

A New Hope also happens to be my favorite Star Wars movie, and hope is what Superman's S stands for. (Still doubt my geekiness? Lol.)

If you could get a tattoo of a single word, what would you get and what language would you get it in? :)