Hi friends, thanks for joining me back here for the second week in a row where I discuss a tattoo that I just got over the weekend (I promise there will be a break between this and the next two tattoo posts!)
First of all, mirrorballs (otherwise known as disco balls) are incredibly pretty, and I love the sparkle emojis, (and surprise white ink), that I added to mine because they make it even more glamorous, but secondly, yes, you guessed it, this is subtly another Taylor Swift tattoo. This blog post also ended up being a lot more vulnerable than I originally thought it would be, so I hope you enjoy gaining a little more insight into my mind than you might usually find in a tattoo post.
Also, shout out to Maly at Tattoo Crew for this one - 7 out of my now 8 tattoos were done at Tattoo Crew, but this is the first that I'd booked in with her, and she was absolutely incredible. She is such a friendly ray of sunshine, and it was a pleasure to be tattooed by her. Thank you for chatting about Gilmore Girls with me for an hour and a half, if you're reading - I had so much fun!
This tattoo represents the song mirrorball, from the album folklore which came out during the summer of 2020, and it came out at a particular time of the pandemic where I really needed it - Stephen and I had been shielding for four whole months already, were terrified of getting covid, I was terrified of even going outside at all for how high risk Stephen was, and teaching remotely was driving me insane. During one of our 'art and jam' sessions which is where Stephen sketched and I practised my brush calligraphy while we showed each other our favourite songs, I went on Instagram to find that Taylor had announced a release date for her surprise album, folklore. I bet you can guess the soundtrack of the art and jam session that followed.
The album means a massive amount to me due to how it saved me from myself while I was going through the emotions of being in a pandemic, and we even had one of the songs in our wedding ceremony as I've mentioned in the past so you can tell that it's up there as one of my favourites. I also already have a saturn tattoo, inspired by a lyric in her song seven, on the same album, which you can also read about if you haven't. One of the two remaining mystery tattoo bookings that I've vaguely mentioned is also another folklore tattoo, and the other isn't anything to do with Taylor Swift at all, so I bet you're excited about that!
In the long pond studio sessions, Taylor says that mirrorball is a metaphor for celebrity, as mirrorballs are always in the centre of the room as they're glittery and they reflect light, but they're also broken in a million places which is what makes them so shiny, but when the spotlight isn't on them, they're just there and fragmented and nobody's looking at them anymore no matter how hard they try to get the attention back on them. It's a song about how not just celebrities, but the average person often feels like they have to be 'on' for certain people, and different versions of themselves for different people in their lives i.e at work, around family, around friends, and how while it's a normal part of the human experience, it's also tiring to have to be that duplicitous. She also addresses the pandemic in the song through the lyric of 'they called off the circus, burned the disco down, when they sent home the horses, and the rodeo clowns' and it's about the experience of her having her tour/shows cancelled, and the experience of living through a pandemic as an artist.
I obviously can't relate to that last part, but as a person with anxiety, I relate to the vulnerability that the song is about - particularly the feeling of always needing to be 'on', and shimmering and perfect even when I'm not feeling up to it, as the stigma around mental health is still so real and rampant. I don't do this anymore as I've grown and found myself a lot, but in the past, I have been a person without boundaries, who has said 'yes' to everything even when I didn't really want to go somewhere, or do something, and I definitely have put myself in harm's way before just to seem 'normal', because having to explain to someone that 'I can't go there because I had my first panic attack there', or 'this thing happened at this place one time, and I can't go back because my body remembers it' doesn't seem like a logical thing to say out loud sometimes, so there's something incredibly relatable about Taylor singing 'I can change everything about me to fit in'.
We live in a society that pushes this narrative of toxic positivity, and I absolutely hate it because it forces people to pretend that everything is sparkly and okay with them, when it's not - I don't do that anymore, but that, to me, is what the song is about - trying to stand on your 'tallest tiptoes', [...] 'still on that trapeze', performing that life is perfect, because that's what the world accepts.
Anyway, it's on my left arm at the top of my triceps, and to me, it represents that while a part of my mind is 'broken', I am still beautiful and life is still pretty wonderful and shimmering most of the time, but I still have my bad days, and I don't have to hide them because they're a normal part of the human experience.
This one took about 90 minutes and on the pain scale I'd say it was pretty low, (surprisingly, given all of the detail on it!). Maly also very kindly offered to add in some accenting through the middle of the mirrorball and the stars, in white ink - I think that part hurt the most but only because accenting is done at the end of the tattoo where the skin is already a little bit sore, so it would have hurt just as much whether it was black or white ink at the end there. It's definitely my most detailed tattoo, and it's also my first tattoo which has white ink throughout it for some extra pizzazz, so obviously I'm absolutely obsessed with it!
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 run-downs of my tattoos.