The first Tattoo

Yessir, I got me a tatty. I was blessed enough to be able to participate in the summer Olympics this past year, so I figured this was as good a time as any to come up with a sybolic tattoo. Who better to ask to draw the idea than my dad, he's been my lifelong pitching coach, took me to all of my practices and games year round growing up, and on top of that he's a very gifted artist. He came up with about 100 sketches until we finally decided on a mix of a bunch to come out with the final product. I asked him to put in several symbols which he did well. I wanted to have the Canadian flag represented for where I was born and raised and where the baseball career began, I also wanted the Dutch flag, for who I participated in the Olympics with. On top of that something to do with baseball, and the Olympic rings too. He came up with an abstract stick figure of me in my pitching motion and added it to the middle of the tattoo beautifully. Check it out...

First of all, we were the nerds that showed up at the tattoo place 5 minutes before they opened, so we were the first customers of the day. We got in after driving to get a orange juice and some cash for the tattoo down the street and came back to 'Eyewitness tattoos + piercings'. I went in hoping I could find a fella names Jake who did Shorty's back last year with the vine and flowers, but he had moved to Missouri to work at some other place. So, the first artist I talked to was a guy named Psycho. Yep, Psycho. He looked his name, and sounded like it too with his very low, drawn out, mono-tone, southern pronunciation of everything he was saying... until he found something funny and burst into a nervous-sounding, out of character laugh. I came in and showed Psycho the artwork my dad had put together after hours and hours of his sketches and pre-drawings, and he sketches out his own version, which was pretty much a photo-copy of my dads work, and I was happy about that.

After 25 minutes of setting up and my own nervousness sitting next to him watching all the preps and what not he got under way. It took just under an hour and wasn't nearly as painful as I had expected. He has been doing tattoo's for over 20 years, and you could tell by the slow and controlled hand movements while applying the artwork that he was a pro.

It turned out exactly as I had hoped, it's a spitting image of his sketch, and bring together all the symbols I wanted to portray beautifully.

So this was a big day for me, and I am proud to now wear a symbol like this on my right forearm.




Tattoo day, we were there a bit before they opened, so Shorty and I just chilled in the parking lot, apparently I'm getting a little nervous here.



Last picture of bare right forearm *sobs*.



Getting the black outline done, my first taste of a tattoo gun. I pretty much prepared myself for the worst, and it wasn't nearly as bad as I figured it would be painwise.



This is Psycho...



First photo of the finished product



Full body shot to get an idea of where it's at on my arm.