The boys around here call it "The Black Lagoon" - a paradise.

Tattoo by Neen owner of FoxDen Tattoos in Wallingford, CT June 2021

FoxDen is genuinely one of the most beautiful places to visit. It’s an embodiment of each person who works there down to their uniqueness and their flaws. Being a queer specific space is also so much easier at this stage of my life. There’s no being on edge or being worried or being ON, instead here it is just being.

I got this tattoo the same week that my career started to feel like pieces I had worked so hard for were falling apart, where I felt like a failure, where I was stressed about navigating a career shift, my upcoming top surgery and some equally exciting moments with Project HEAL where I got to meet one of my idols and share the nuanced experience of balancing my eating disorder recovery with my transition.

Being in a safe and accepting place while holding all of this felt like such a relief and it feels important to honor that this was all part of this experience. Which leads me to water. Water is literally everything. It’s our bodies, one of things we each need to be fueled, to fuel our planet, to understand fluidity and light and to understand that things can be equally dark, deep, appear scary but often this is a misinterpretation of the reality that not everything needs to be of light to be loving or valuable. It’s this knowledge and belief that pushed me to want to have Neen do the darker parts of my water leg. I felt like she could understand the beauty and gift of darkness, of ugly, of difference of unconventional.

As we began to chat Neen took beautiful creative control over the “Creature From The Black Lagoon” themed piece and brilliantly created symmetry with the piece on the back of my other thigh. She add this beautiful Norse Rune meaning, “You Will Come To No Harm In Water”. This binding rune is created to represent deeper, more powerful meanings and were believed to contain magical properties. It felt so deeply fitting that my dark and magical create would come with a binding protection from and with the thing I value so deeply, the water and its darkness. This piece is only the beginning of what is clearly going to be a deeply magical and meaningful part of my body and journey.

It’s healed perfectly thus far and as I prepare for top surgery I feel like I have a little extra magical support, a dark, water-filled guardian angel to guide me through the process.