The never ending strive for perfection

This is one of my tattoos. With tattoos, I believe in putting them in discrete places so I can show them when I want but they're not exposed when wearing normal clothes. This tattoo is on the inside of my right bicep.

This tattoo in particular I designed and had done a few years ago when I was about 24 years old. My wife and I decided on a whim to go gettem one evening after work and we happened upon Al's Rock of Ages tattoo parlor, on El Camino Real. We were living in San Mateo and working in SF at the time. I ended up designing this puzzle theme after seeing an episode of X-files with Mulder and Scully working on a case at a carnival. Within this episode, a sideshow performer in real life was playing a character as himself, the Enigma. That sentence may not read correctly but I'm not clever enough at the moment to change it.

I'm really not sure where I'm going with this post so I think I'll stop but I will be getting another one soon. I just need to design it. Ohh wait, there was a story about getting to the tattoo parlor that goes a little like this:

My wife and I drive to the location which isn't far from our apartment at the time; I'm driving. We see the place on the left but I turned too early into a small parking lot for a apartment complex and as I drive around the back to find a place to turn around, I see a black extension cord going across the driveway and is attached to a lamp that a man is using to see under the hood as he was obviously trying to work on his truck. As I drive over the cord, I see him look at us and I just want to get the heck outta this lot since it looks a little shady. I start my 3 point turn but as I back up, I drive right over where two extension cords meet and I see his bulb flash and go out. Uh oh, he looks at his bulb and then at us in a disgusted look and I immediately high-tail it out of there, not wanting to stay to see what he would have done. When we get to the end of the driveway, we would need to go left to the tattoo parlor but I'm so freaked out about that guy's lamp and thinking it was a bad omen, I just wanted to go back home and forget about the tattoo that evening.

My wife however still wanted to do it and mentioned if she didn't get one that night, she might back out altogether so I agreed and we ended up parking on the street several streets over so that dude couldn't see where we went if he was gonna follow us which I don't think he did. We laughed at the whole situation after we got home that night but holy cow, at that moment, we were both freaked out and the auspice involving the breaking of the bulb almost made us give up on the whole tattoo thing for good; glad we didn't :)