This was my first tattoo, after wanting one for about four years and even chickening out in 2006 after having the picture drawn and an appointment booked. Being a pretty normal girl, I am afraid of pain and commitment, ok?
The drawing which I eventually went with was almost decided upon on a whim - I booked the appointment for the tattoo three months in advance and had an artist drawing a bear for me - however she became very busy in the lead up to my appointment and we couldn't resolve the drawing in time. So I had about three weeks to go and no drawing!
And then - brainwave. I was in Brisbane visiting my Mum and looked through some old albums of photos I took in 1999. There were so many photographs of houses. Not houses I knew, but other peoples houses I saw in the street. Then I thought about artwork I made in 2004. I put architectural drawings of houses into collages I was making for my school work at uni. Flash forward to 2009 and I was still obsessed with other peoples houses. I walked around the streets I lived in Melbourne and took pinhole photographs of houses I saw. And I realised what I really want a tattoo of is my lasting obsession of the last ten years. A house.
So, of course, when I started thinking about who would have drawn the 'right' house, I thought of Melbourne artist Catherine Campbell. A very talented artist whose work I have been admiring since I first saw it in Melbourne a few years ago. I remembered seeing an exhibition about a year ago that contained a beautiful old house adrift in a woman's hair. I found the artwork on her portfolio site, emailed her, and got her blessing to go ahead with the tattoo all in the same day.
And so a few weeks later I went in and had the house inked.
It wasn't til afterwards that I thought about how badly the tattoo could have gone if my tattooist wasn't able to render all those straight lines perfectly. Luckily, Jai is an incredible tattooist! He made a few changes to the original artwork, as you will see in the images below. The delicate shading is probably the finest alteration he made to the image, but he also added a wintery gust of snow which he wanted to reference the blue waves in the original picture.
I love my house. I have had it for about three months now but it still sometimes surprises me that I went through with it! What also surprises me is how much attention it receives. This is no exaggeration - almost every person I meet either socially or just buying milk at the local shop compliments me on it! I had three client meetings this week and every single client asked me about it. Luckily I work in an industry where it's not career limiting to have an arm tattoo!
So here it is!
And here is Catherine Campbell's original artwork:
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