My Tattoo!

Wow. What a night!
Last night I got my first tattoo and it will be one I never forget.

The artist, Jim, started my tattoo. About 5 minutes in he asked if someone was burning incense. The other dude there said yeah it was possible, they did it often.

20 minutes or so into the tattoo, one flower and tree leaf cluster complete, smoke starts billowing into the upstairs hallway and someone yells from downstairs, "Fire! Get out now!".

Jim puts down the "pen", I grab my stuff and we proceed to evacuate out the front. Smoke is seeping through the basement windows around the sides of the house. This is in Gettysburg, downtown, an old duplex building.

We go around back to get a look-see at the fire. It's coming from the back porch, which is also the entrance to the basement. It's wooden, with a door, and on fire!! One of the other artists was able to put out the majority of the flame with a few jugs of water before the first voluteer fireman arrived shouting, "Where's the fire!?", in his very hick, fire obsessed voice. It was so obnxious, not for him I'm sure, that I wanted to laugh so bad, but I held it in.

Click the pictures for a closer look!

 

Then the whole fire squad, ambulance squad, reporters, and police men arrived closing off the entire block. The response was insane and they were there before the girl who called 9-1-1 was even off the phone with them! I think this had to do with the ADT fire alarm system they had installed in the building.

We crowded on the front sidewalk until they gave us the all clear to re-enter the building. The fire was contained on just the back porch and the smoke was removed using an awesome, huge fan they blew into the building.

The firemen left deflated looking because there wasn't any "real" fire to put out. At least one guy had fun axing the hell out of the porch. They couldn't get their chain saw to work. :(

We returned to our now freezing room to continue my tattoo. Which I am completely satisfied with. Jim did great. The pain was minimal and pretty much tickled and gave me continious goose bumps.

Here's my Celtic Tree of Life:

It's on my right, inner forearm. My elbow crease is at the bottom of the above pic. I wanted it position so that it was right side up to me, not others looking at it. It's mine and I want to see it correctly!
What do you think?

P.S. My artist was Jimbo of Chrome Gardens.Here's their blog post about the incident!

http://chromegardens.com/