My 17th tattoo is another addition to my ongoing sticker sleeves, and I am completely head over heels in love with it - I think it's one of the cutest tattoos I have, but it's also incredibly meaningful to me. This one is on my right outer arm, and it's a teacup inside of a postage stamp design, which is a reference to Harry Styles' song 'Matilda'.
I absolutely cried my heart out when he played it during his tour last year, and I knew that it would make its way on to me permanently at some point. Maly (from Studio Luna Nova, always!) did such a beautiful job - I knew that I wanted a cute teacup with a heart/swirl design inside of a stamp, but it was her genius mind that came up a design which was exactly what I wanted - we even did the hearts in red to match the outfit that Harry wore on the night I saw him live, which is so special. Tattoo artists have more talent in their pinkie fingers than I have in my entire body, and the design process is so much fun to watch!
The song is incredibly upsetting if you feel like you deeply relate to it like I do, so I'll warn you about that right now, but it is a beautifully written song.
It's essentially about the way the Roald Dahl character Matilda was not treated well by her family, and my tattoo is based on the line 'you're just in time, make your tea and your toast'. This lyric is about Harry welcoming the person into his house and making them feel at home there, in the way that they don't in their literal house.
This is what Harry has said about it:
I had an experience with someone where, in getting to know them better, they revealed some stuff to me that was very much like, ‘Oh, that’s not normal, like I think you should maybe get some help or something.’ This song was inspired by that experience and person, who I kind of disguised as Matilda from the Roald Dahl book. I played it to a couple of friends and all of them cried. So I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is something to pay attention to.’ It’s a weird one, because with something like this, it’s like, ‘I want to give you something, I want to support you in some way, but it’s not necessarily my place to make it about me because it’s not my experience.’ Sometimes it’s just about listening. I hope that’s what I did here. If nothing else, it just says, ‘I was listening to you.'
Tea has always been a big part of my life, both as a child and now. I just love a hot drink and I find it incredibly centering when I need to calm down, or make a plan, or have a hard conversation. We make cups of tea for each other throughout the day when we're both home at the same time, every guest who comes to ours is offered a cup of tea, it's always a pleasant moment in the day where you can just sit and hold something warm. It's always been a nice thing for me, even though I gave up caffeine about 7 years ago now, I honestly can't tell the difference with decaf tea and it still provides me with the same comfort as it did when I drank caffeine.
I chose to put the cup of tea inside the postage stamp because I feel like the song is about making a home for yourself, not necessarily where you started, but where you choose to go. The stamp will remind me that whatever journey I take, I will end up where I am supposed to be, and can create a home for myself which is happier than the one I was born into, so long as there is love and a cup of tea there.
As the opening theme song of The Fosters says, it's not where you come from, it's where you belong
(I also think stamp tattoos sort of resemble ravioli sometimes which is so cute lol)
This one was super quick as it only took somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes. On the pain scale, it literally barely hurt at all, which is the dream!
I will now be taking a break from tattoos so that I can save up for our honeymoon, (and I've learnt my lesson with how difficult it is to shield new tattoos from the sun), so I'll be back to continue building my sticker sleeves in the autumn!
As always, I've popped this into the 'tattoos' category on my blog, so feel free to have a scroll through that if you missed any of my previous rundowns of my tattoos.
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