Lucky tattoo

My mum told me over and over again that you have to be in it to win. That is exactly what I do, enter everything that I stumble across. At this point, I am not even entirely sure if it is considered a hobby or just an obsession.

Surprisingly, or not so surprising if you are also passionate about competitions, Instagram is a good place to find them. Most of the ones that I have found were from pop up ads on the app or friends who tagged me in the post. If you are wondering if they are legit, I am proof that they work, and you can actually win things. I have won a few things, the biggest thing that I won was a full day tattoo session.

Picture this, it is the first day of the year and I am out getting coffee with my boyfriend. He goes inside the café to use the bathroom. This gives me the opportunity to check my phone. There is a notification on the screen that I have a message from this Instagram account that I don’t recognise. The content of the message informs me that I have won a full day tattoo session, which I don’t remember entering. At first, I think it is a fake, but it wasn’t. I wanted to scream, but I am in public and people don’t socially accept random people screaming in the street. I share the excitement with my boyfriend once he gets back and he didn’t believe it either.

The tattooist wasn’t the easiest person to organise a time with and I started to doubt whether this was going to happen, it could have been a hoax just to get more followers. I was so close to giving up on getting a response from her, but it did eventually happen. She told me that she wanted to do it soon because she was leaving Melbourne, she was a guest at one of the tattoo shops in my city.

The tattoo shop was in my favourite hipster suburb in the city that I live in, it was above an alternative record shop. There were two ways to get to the upstairs tattoo shop, either go through the backdoor that is in the alleyway or go through the record store, I chose to go through the record store because at least someone would be able to tell me where to go.

Before I climbed the stairs, I noticed that the place looked like a run-down apartment that had been turned into a tattoo parlour, which was more noticeable when you got inside. Upstairs there was a guy outside smoking, he said hello and opened the door for me. The tattoo artist had a little open area space set up, where the others had separate rooms with a door for privacy, not that I needed that.

We got all the boring stuff over and done with. It was time for the magic to happen, which wasn’t actually magic at all, the actual tattooing was hell. We smashed out the tattoo in about 7 and a half hours because we didn’t take many breaks. I sat well, but inside I was dying. It was the worst pain that I had ever felt. At one point I had to stop and go to the bathroom to cry. My pain tolerance is high, but that pain was on a whole other level. I wanted my tattooist to hurt just as bad as I. I went from loving her to hating her with a passion, that was the excruciating pain talking, she was very lovely and professional and would definitely come back to her.

Sometimes I look at the tattoo in the mirror and my jaw drops. I can’t believe the skill and time that went into it and I won it, she did it out of kindness. Call me one lucky woman. Her style is not normally my thing, but I love it so much.

You might think competitions, especially on Instagram are a scam or a waste because no one actually wins, just remember this story or the image of the tattoo, because I am proof that people can win things.