Last fall, I got a tattoo of the Hebrew symbol for grace. Right away, it became a problem because it looked like the letter E from the side, so everyone thought I was lame and got an E for Erin. I've been wanting to add to it forever, so Thursday I finally pulled the email my Old Testament professor had sent me to see the other symbol I wanted. (It's the symbol for steadfast love and faithfulness, as in "His love endures forever.") As I looked at the email, I made a horrifying discovery. My grace tattoo was on backwards. I had the mirror image of what it was supposed to be.

I immediately made an appointment to see Marci at Tatu Tattoo. Yesterday we sat down and tried to figure out how to fix it. I wanted to make it into music notes, but the lines were too thick. So then Marci came up with the great idea of doing a piano that kind of fades into music notes. So this is what I ended up with:



I am still getting used to it. It's a big change. I'm not crazy about the dark shading, but it was necessary. What I love is that it has significance to me. It's not so much because I used to sing, it's more for my mom. She is a piano teacher, which meant I grew up hearing lots of terrible piano music. But once in a while, she'd pull out the difficult music and just play for the fun of it, and I would lay under the piano and just be in heaven. My favorite (and I think her favorite, too), was Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I can play the toccata, but not the fugue, which is the best part and the part I remember her playing the most. So my tattoo is actually the first few notes of the fugue. I have a Bach tattoo. How badass is that?

Here is the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor from Fantasia, which I also watched a lot when I was little. The fugue starts around 3:40.