Sara, this is for you!

I know Ive shared my tattoos here somewhere, but I couldnt find the post! So for those of you who have asked to see my tattoos, here you go.

It was actually super hard for me to find one straight on of my arm tattoo! This gorgeous black and white photo was taken by Katelyn Demidow. I cherish this photo.

This arm sleeve is a work in progress. All of the spots in between each tattoo is not intended to be black, I just have not gone back to fill it in yet.

All of my tattoos are for my mother. This arm sleeve was started about a year after she passed away. The woman is an Alphonse Mucha painting and it just reminded me of her essence. The rest including the butterfly and the peacock feathers is just going to be full of nature and beauty, things that remind me of her.

The teacups represent her lifelong business. She made jewelry from broken china dishes for almost 30 years. I spent my first several years out of high school working with her. It was what kept our family fed and my mom at home with me. It was a huge part of our lives. Now it is gone, but I am living the same dream in my own ways now. I think you can click on the photo to make it bigger to see the details. There is a cardinal in one of them and 'mom' in another.

Around the woman it has lyrics from a Joni Mitchell song 'River'... its says ' I wish I had a river I could skate away on. This song was one she sang to me as a baby. And I sang to her as she was dying. It is the single most meaningful song in my life.

The crazyness from the back. I think this is one of the first photos Ive seen with all of showing like that! We just took this for the Skyline Fever shoot!

This is my shoulder tattoo, two bluebirds of happiness on a branch of cherry blossoms. Besides the silly black tramp stamp I got on my lower back (not being shown), this was my 3rd real tattoo. The second you cant see b/c this was a cover up of it. If you look in the photo above, the big purple peony is covering up a black celtic love knot. My tattoo artist did an amazing job. I wont go into why its covered, it was sad but had to be done for personal reasons.

I got this tattoo when my mom first beat her breast cancer. We thought she was going to be okay, and this tattoo represented her and I and all that we both personally were going through during this time in our lives.

Im a pretty firm believer of only getting tattoos that mean something personal to you, not just something cute or pretty. And I also believe in making them original, not just copying a pic of the wall. If you want a tattoo, take time to really think it through, the design, the color, the placement. Even if you have to think for a year or two, its worth it. I even went in with a design in my head and my tattooist started drawing it up, I didnt feel it was perfectly what I wanted, so I told him to stop and do it later. You must be 100% sure, its going to be there forever.

And for anyone curious, my tattoo artist is Brian Johnson from austin.

PEACE,

Laura