The Whole World Is A Garden

Brittany of Pins and Needle Tattoos in Simsbury, CT FIRST TATTOO OF January 2021

I’ve got to start this one by saying Brittany’s studio was lovely! I wanted to curl up and nap amongst the mint green walls, repurposed wood and the smell of cedar and pine. I was slightly anxious about this tattoo and the shop environment and Brittany’s friendly and kind demeanor made it all melt away.

This tattoo felt particularly emotionally activating and I’m glad I found someone who had a real therapeutic touch (and love for art therapy which was a big plus for my inner art therapy nerd). So a neck tattoo involved a lot of thought. In my mind it was the trifecta of the “fucked for life” tattoo club, hand, face and neck…well I’ve done the other two and this was a tattoo I wanted close to me. You see growing up I distinctly loved “The Secret Garden”. My mom gave me multiple versions to read and would watch the movie with me. I can always remember her reminding me that just like in the book, “If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” My mother was a big gardener growing up. We had flower beds all over our yard and a vegetable garden in the back. Nature, gardening and using nature to escape were a big part of my life growing up. I regularly look outdoors and turn my head one way or another, envision the worldly garden we would create in our heads as a kid. I have many flowers throughout many of my tattoos but they were never for this specific memory.

So I found Brittany and eventually asked her to tattoo flowers on my neck based on her work and the colors I had in my chest piece. She created this beautiful cluster of buttercup-esque flowers and a little crescent moon to tie in all the stars and stardust interspersed throughout my tattoos. It was perfect and if I was going to tattoo my neck it was going to be that. The perfect expression of a memory, a time period, a person I once was, my mother, it encompassed all of it. And, I hadn’t told any of this to Brittany. It’s my favorite thing to see the universe and a real artist bring to life a feeling that they had no idea they were being presented with. So I will leave with another key line from “The Secret Garden”,

“I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us”