oranges & lemons

Hello my loves,

I got my 15th (???) tattoo! I’ve lost count at this point. I think it’s number 15.

I was originally supposed to get this tattoo back in March but due to Ms. Rona showing up I had to wait and have it re-scheduled to October instead – I originally booked this tattoo in November of last year so it’s been a long time coming!

I always do posts on my tattoos as a little way to document them for myself (and hopefully you guys find them interesting too) and so after nearly a year of waiting, I’m finally able to get around to writing this post!

(note: I took these photos the day after I got it done because I’m too impatient to wait until it’s healed so it looks very dark due to excess ink & in the close ups you can probably still see a lot of the inky mess that hasn’t been cleaned up yet)

Age= 22
Placement = Left forearm
Pain = 3/10
Price = £350

As you can see, this tattoo is essentially…oranges and lemons. Overall it has no big meaning and it doesn’t represent anything, but there were a couple of things that inspired it and gave me the idea in the first place so, here we go.

I knew that for this piece I wanted something tropical per say – 80% of my tattoos are already floral and so I wanted something different to break up the work on my left arm a bit, as everything on the inner part of this arm is all florals. Tropical things to me are very summery and vintage-y, very nostalgic, you know? Like in a Summer haze which, if you guys know me or have been around for a while, you’ll know that nostalgia and old Summers are essentially the basis of my life and I spend my days thinking about them, writing about them and wishing I was in them. They connect to a lot of things for me. It reminds me of Lana and Frank and all the beautiful stuff.

When thinking of tropical things, I instantly thought of fruit – at the time I had just finished watching Beyonce’s homecoming on Netflix and was feeling very empowered and inspired, and then I thought of lemons. And then I thought of Lemonade.

This isn’t a Beyonce tattoo, but Lemonade definitely came into it because what an album and what a woman that made it. Beyonce is like…Mother Earth. She makes me feel safe and like everything is going to be okay ’cause you know, they don’t call her Queen Bey for nothing. At that point I was set on lemons, but then as time went on (you know, ’cause I’ve had a whole 10 months to think about this) I was thinking it’d be nice to mix some oranges in there too because when I think of tropical, vintage Summers, there’s always orange trees in the markets and against the sky. Kind of like, when I think about the setting for Call Me By Your Name in Italy during that Summer, oranges are always one of the first things that come to mind (though it should be peaches, but we’ll leave that for another time).

And then…in July of this year, I saw the cover for Lana’s poetry book for the first time, which I’d been longly awaiting ever since she announced she was even writing one, and guess what was on the front cover?

Oranges.

And so then I was set. Oranges and lemons. When life gives you lemons listen to lemonade and love Lana Del Rey. That’s the motto. Makes no sense, but it’s the motto. It’s the vibe we’re going for with this tattoo, anyway.

My artist did such an incredibly beautiful job of this I can’t actually believe it’s my tattoo. Like. This is on me. Normally this is the kind of tattoo I’d see posted of someone else and I’d be like…holy wow I need that. But this one is actually mine. Mine ! *insert seagulls from Finding Nemo*

This one basically didn’t hurt at all. I don’t usually talk about the pain of my tattoos unless areas of it were particularly bad but I feel as though since this is such a big piece (it’s the biggest piece I’ve had anyway) I should mention if it hurt and for me, it didn’t. The most painful part of tattoos for me is actually getting wiped down throughout the session where it feels like they’re skinning you alive :)))) having a needle dragged through my skin for 4 hours on end? No problem. Having a tissue wiped over my tattoo to get rid of excess ink so the artist can see what they’re doing? The depths of hell. The. Depths. Of. Hell. The definition of sore. The only areas of this tattoo that really hurt were at the top near my elbow (I wanted to get my elbow done at some point in the future and now I am seriously re-thinking it) and the top inner parts at the crook of my arm (flashback to this tattoo that was so sore I can’t believe I actually did it).

So yeah, this is just a lemon with two orange segments framing it surrounded by some pretty flowers and leaves – they could also be lemon segments but you literally cannot tell if they’re oranges or lemons either way so I’m just calling them orange or lemon segments depending on how I feel at the time (we love interchanging !).

Speaking of which, the attention to detail is just…insane. The texture of the inside of the lemons ?? Oranges ?? Whatever the hell you want to call them ?? How do you even emulate that ?? How do you replicate something so perfectly?? I literally cannot stop staring at it. I literally have the best tattoo artist / most beautiful tattoos ever and I am so so grateful.

This tattoo is so so beautiful and I love it so much – obsessed is an…understatement? I can’t stop looking at it. I feel like this just brought everything together for me because my tattoos are very scattered and the ones that are next to each other are just kind of…next to each other but they don’t really feel part of one bigger thing, so I feel like this tattoo really brought everything together and incorporated everything beautifully. I’m so pleased with it!

All my love,

Chloe .xx

Previous Tattoo Posts
1, 2 & 3
4
5
6
7 & 8
9
10
11
12
13
14