For Una, the first thing she thought of was her "chop", which is a representation of her Chinese name. Artists stamp their chop in the corner of their paintings, and Una had been using hers on letters. In her case, the characters used were from a really old script (like from 500 BC, the second oldest Chinese script known), and wouldn't be readable except to maybe a chinese scholar, or really old people in China. On top of that, it was designed by her late father, so it contained several layers of meaning for her.

The pressure now was on me to find a suitable symbol to put on myself. I looked, I searched, I meditated, and failed miserably. I couldn't find anything. Finally, I decided that the phoenix would be a good personal symbol, since I seemed to have a propensity to reinvent myself every few years. Finding a suitable image (the coolness test) took a long time as well. Eventually, I decided on a particular celtic design from a flash art book, then changed my mind and picked another. This is forever, I told myself as I flip-flopped back and forth, eventually picking the more realistic design.

On Valentine's Day, we scouted out the establishment we were interested in, a tattoo parlour called Art With a Pulse. They had a pretty good reputation, and we had seen it several times driving by, so by default it became the place we had in mind when we started thinking about getting tattoos. We stopped in after our V-Day lunch, so we were dressed pretty nicely. Jack, Donna, and Mary Ann were the tattoo artists in residence, and all were occupied when we walked in. There was a strange odor as we walked in, but it took me awhile to place it - rubbing alcohol.

I suppose our dress put them off a bit, and we felt a little uncomfortable being dressed up as well. We looked at the flash art hanging on the walls, then started looking at the books of photos on the tables. It appeared that Jack was pretty accomplished with portraits, Donna was good with Celtic designs, and Mary Ann did the more intricate Chinese characters. Eventually, Jack was free and came over to talk to us. We hadn't brought any of the designs with us, so we got a ballpark figure, and basically agreed to come back with the designs.

Una did just that later on the following week, and set up appointments for her and myself. She was due to go first that coming Saturday with Mary Ann, and I was scheduled for the following Saturday with Donna. At first I wasn't too happy about that - I wanted us to get tattoos at the same time. But then I changed my mind one final time and decided to go back to the abstract phoenix design, and needed some time to clean it up a bit and smooth out the lines. So in the end it worked out. This is forever, I thought.