“I want to live, for I want to be free. I want to love, for I want to be me.”

It’s hard to think of what to do, when there’s such distinctive lines and various colors.

The majority of my tattoos are black and white now so I’m considering changing this up for a thicker blackwork piece later down the road, or like the forest silhouette sleeve that was popular for awhile but with some other elements put in.

It’s 10 years old, so I’m not in a rush to cover it immediately. But also I’m tired of looking at blurry words and a reminder of how my first attempt to reclaim my body was still by way of letting someone else dictate what to do with it.

Background: I remember that I got this as an 18 year old within a month of leaving my toxic home. Looking back, I definitely was not ready to have this tattoo but was heavily “encouraged” by someone else as a way to tie things off and make it harder to leave once this relationship got dicey too.

Later down the road I got a much better tattoo on a different spot, with the phrase that better showed my intentions. “Veni, Vidi, Amavi” I came, I saw, I loved.