Okay I didn’t hate it, I was just not in love with it like I assumed I would be once I finally took the plunge and got my ink. I have wanted a tattoo for a while now. I initially thought that my first (and perhaps only) tattoo would be a Harry Potter inspired tattoo. But if I was going to go under the needle I had to find the right tattoo. It had to be special, it had to be original. It couldn’t look like any other Harry Potter tattoo. 
 
For years, on some long forgotten weekend, I would spend hours scrolling through tattoo images of Pinterest. The weekend would end and I would forget all about getting a tattoo. Another six months would go by and I would once again spend hours taking screenshots of tattoos. But no matter how many screenshots I took, I never got my tattoo because it never FELT right. 

So back to my tattoo, the one I ended up getting. It might not be a Harry Potter tattoo but it was also inspired by a book. The book is Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. The book tells the story of a man who truly knew how to live, who never took his life for granted, and always lived life to the fullest. He was fearless. He lived his life like most of us only dream of living ours.  

Shortly after we meet Will he is hit by a motorcyclist, he survives but he is left as a quadraplegic. His family hires a caretaker that is in many ways the opposite of who he was before the accident. She is complacent in life, and as much as she would like to convince herself otherwise, she is not happy.

One night as she is driving both of them back to his home, they drive past a tattoo parlor. She nonchalantly mentions that she always wanted to get a tattoo. His response is. ”Pull over and go get one.” Immediately, her reaction is, “No I can’t, I have to get you home. I wouldn’t know what to get. I’ll get it another time.”

As I read the words on the page, I was her and she was me, and he was right. Why not?! Why not get the tattoo! We can plan, we can wait, we can search and it might never feel right. We keep waiting for things to to feel 100% right but if you want something sometimes you just have to action even if you only feel 80% ready.

Emilia ended up getting her tattoo. She got a bee on her hip and two days later I got my very own bee tattoo. (I gave myself two days to search for the bee tattoo I wanted, it is permanent after all). Am I satisfied with my bee tattoo choice? No I am not. To be completely honest the wings look a little off to me.  However, am I satisfied with my decision? Hell yes!!! Every time I look at the tattoo it is reminder that I am capable of taking a leap and getting what I want.   

They say that at the end of their life people regret the things they didn’t do, not the things they did do regardless of how painful, reckless, or outright stupid they might have been. Regret is an awful thing. I for one don’t want to be filled with regret at the end of my life, so I better push myself to do as much as I can while I can because, “why not?”