The Birth of a Dragon

The Story - Yep... There's Always a Story...

I had been wanting to get a dragon tattoo for quite some time. I'm talking years. I had never gotten around to it because of this or that, but mostly because of the lack of funds. These things aren't cheap you know. But... through quite a wild twist of fate, it became possible, and I jumped at the chance.

The story begins with my desire to have a faster internet connection. I'm sure that you are wondering what in the world that has to do with anything, but hang in there... we're getting to that.

We have a power pole just up the road from our house. The power company was doing some work on it, and ultimately ended up replacing it with a taller pole. We couldn't figure out why until we saw what looked to be a radio antenna at the very top of it. The first thing I thought was wireless internet. I was certainly excited! I grabbed Barbara and we jumped in the car to find out what it was pointing to. We discovered that it was just pointing to another power pole a couple of miles away.

Confused, we headed home. On the way, we saw a turtle in the road. We always stop to get them out of the road, and this was no exception. By the time we got turned around, he had been hit. We scooped him up anyway, and took him home with us. We called the vet, and probably ended up saving his life (read more about Lucky the Turtle).

I guess that saving the little turtle got me some Karma points because the next day at work, I made some killer money. The funny thing about it was that on my way out the door to go to work, I told Barbara that if I made $1,000, I was going to get my tattoo. We kinda giggled about it knowing that it wasn't going to happen. Well... it did. I made exactly $1,051 that day. I just thought it was the funniest thing in the world, and couldn't wait to call Barbara and tell her. On my next break, I did just that. I told her that now I get to go get my tattoo!

On my next day off, we headed on over to Underground Art in Memphis, TN to talk to Paul Look. I was telling him what I wanted to get, and asked how long he thought it would take. He replied with a number that just totally crushed me... 30 hours or so. I really hadn't even considered that it would take that long. I mean they can put one of these on in about 10 minutes on Miami-Ink. :) Well, at $100 an hour, I wasn't even close to having enough money to get what I wanted.