RoryQ

My right arm is pretty tender right now, from about the bicep down. Trying to keep it relatively straight and avoid bending it totally in order to try and help the ditch heal. My fiancee sleeps on the right side of me, and she keeps rolling over onto it. I've been retaliating with a knuckle or two in the side, and she seems to get the message (joking.... Mostly).

@CaptCanada Yep, that's right.

I'm going to be in Cambodia for a little over a week next month, and was wondering if any forumites have been there? Any tips or general observations would be welcome. It's more or less a sight-seeing trip. We'll be staying in 'nice' hotels, and staying in the capital and Siam Reap for all of it. We're vaccinated, taking malarial tablets and will keep things fairly low-key I expect. From a tattoo perspective I was considering covering up the buddha on my arm with long sleeves while I'm there, not sure how the locals might feel about that?

Just back from two days under the needle. The artist was Ching, from Taiwan (as you can probably see from his watermarking of the photos). He's guesting at White Dragon Tattoo in Belfast along with his buddy Yang. Got to do the left arm when they come back next year... photo hosting photo hosting Overall a not bad couple of days. The outline and black background was relatively straightforward (on Monday). Yesterday ended up taking 7-8 hours, I think underestimated how much detail was involved in the buddha and hannya details.

OK, I'm now ready to acknowledge that the 3-day a week strength-then-conditioning model isn't working out. I felt great for the first few weeks, but now it's just frustrating. -It's taking two long (45 minutes or so strengthwork, then another 2--25 minutes to get in the conditioning element, leaving me tight for time if I'm doing a lunchtime session and perhaps more importantly -After the strengthwork it feels like I'm only paying lip-servie to the sprints etc. So I'm going to keep the 3 days a week strength, same programming, but do my sprints / conditioning on two seperate days. The difference being that I'm roughly going to double the volume. I'll warm-up, do maybe 10-15 minutes of sprints / shuttle runs and then, after a short break, do some bodyweight conditioning or bag work. Oh well, glad I tried it, believe it or not.

I think sometimes it's good to go in expecting the worst... It would be worse to go in and realise that you understimated how sore it was going to be. Deluxe is a great shop, good bunch of artists.

Ching and Yang from East Tattoo (Taiwan) are guesting at White Dragon in Belfast. I booked in ages ago, getting Ching to bring my right arm down into a full sleeve. Booked in for two days, Monday and Tuesday, and I'm making a little bit of a trip out of it this time. I'm gonna get the train up Monday morning and then stay in Belfast monday night, in the Europa hotel (most bombed hotel in Europe). I'll come home Tuesday evening, hopefully with the sleeve all complete. Slightly awkward time to visit Belfast as there's been a flare up of sectarian violence over the past week - I think there's been three or four nights of rioting in the north of the city. Not ideal, but as long as I keep my mouth shut and don't be stupid about where I go it should be cool. Got to figure out what kind of whiskey I'm going to bring Ching this time.

Training has been going pretty well since I last posted. I feel like I have injected that element of 'athleticism' back into my training which has been missing since I stopped doing BJJ. I'm still following the template described above, with a pushing dominant day, a lower body day and a pulling dominant day. Each session is followed by about 10-20 minutes of conditioning. For the conditioning I've been mainly doing- -1 to 2 mile runs for time -Interval type agility runs ie courses of cones in bursts of 45-60 seconds interspersed with rest periods of 30-45 seconds. -Bodyweight circuits Been ages since I ran or sprinted regularly and I attribute the sense of 'athleticism' and feeling of being pepped up to it. I'm trying to keep it anaerobic and hopefully anabolic rather than catabolic in nature. Diet-wise I'm not as clean as I could be, probably need to get my carb intake down. I've been reading a lot of Pavel T. lately and for my lower body day I can report that I'm able to bang out an increasing amount of pistols. Initially I was doing shaky low-rep sets to parallel but I've seen progress and now I'm upping the reps and going rock bottom with a good deal of control. Been holding a KB or set of DBs out front for balance. In addition to the pistols been doing single leg RDLs, weighted lunges etc. Some high rep sets of air squats as part of conditioning workouts. Overall so far so good, although my pull-up numbers are still lagging. A few years ago my max was 15 strict dead hang, now I'm not sure what it is but I suspect it's closer to 10. No excuses, I need to fix that.

I think it would probably be too pricey to be shipping books left, right and centre from Ireland, but I'd be down with a general thread on books.

'The Sailor's Grave', which Iwar mentioned, seems to do a "walk-in Friday". Usually it's Bjorn who does it, with a sheet of flash done for the day, but I see from their facebook that a guest artist did it recently too.

I saw that on their Facebook group. It doesn't fall at the same time as we're over there, for better or worse (we're going to be in tattoo studios for 6 days out of the 14 days of the trip ... maybe that's enough). Having read some of the previous reports it seems like an absolutely amazing show in terms of some of the work on display, though.

@kylegrey Cool, I dig the wavy blade on the dagger.

When I read that first I thought you were getting tattooed by your 12th birthday... Awesome...

'Isolation' (2005). Basically it's 'Alien' set on an Irish farm. A genetic experiment goes wrong, angry cows etc. What I like about Irish movies like this is that they could be set anywhere. It's a farm, sure, and we have lots of farms in Ireland, but what I mean is there's no leprechauns, there's no-one singing rebel songs, no smiling red-haired lasses dancing at crossroads etc. Less paddywhackery, more ... Er... calves with teeth.

Just got a small painting by a Belfast artist called Colin Davidson. His latest series ('Transmission') is large and small portraits, some of famous Irish people (actors, poets) and some of unknowns. I couldn't afford one of the large-scale pieces, which are just amazing, but managed one of the smaller painting studies. Funnily enough there is a tattoo connection here, as one of the bigger portraits is of Belfast-based tattooist Chris Crooks - Colin Davidson This one of Marketa Irglova, an actress, is probably my favourite:-

Talking about other people- I saw one of the guys from East Tattoo, Hua, get his lower lip / face tattooed last year in Milan. He has a black line that runs from his chin up in a straight line to his bottom lip and over the lip to the inside gum-line, and seemed to be getting it touched-up. Looked absolutely horrific, getting it done. And it swelled up afterwards like he'd been stung by a wasp.

My right leg has trad pieces and a trad panther head (Oliver Peck) on my foot. My left leg has a big japanese dragon all the way up, so arguably if I got a trad style piece on my left foot, like another cat head, it would match my right foot but not the rest of my left leg, if you get my drift... I guess a severed head or other small japanese style tattoo on the foot would fit better with the rest of the left leg, but then we're back to square one - it wouldn't match the other foot. And since foot tattoos aren't really a big part of the traditional japanese lexicon, arguably it wouldn't be any more 'authentic' than getting a trad cat head anyway. Really, it's a first world problem... I mean, either way it's fine. It's not vital to be matchy-matchy, IMO.

Yeah that was a charcuterie plate of local meats. Like this- air-dried beef.

OK, done! When you're closer to planning a trip shoot me a PM and I'll give you some info (Limerick, where Ross' studio is, is about 2 hrs drive from Dublin, but you'll probably want to fly in here and drive or get the train down there).

@jade1955 If you end up making it over I'll bring you for a couple of pints in one of the better pubs in Dublin (bar some unforseen act of god like the wrath of my fiance). Keep meaning to make it down to Limerick myself. I'll still be at the London Convention on the Friday, maybe see you guys there..

I'm a big fan of mums in general, but that comes across as more than a little possessive-bonkers.

Mexican week is drawing to an end...

Well, this year is a big year for both of us to get tattooed. For the first time, we're both getting tattooed in the same shop around the same time. She's in for two days back to back, then I'm in for two days back to back ... And then she's in again for a final two days the following week. Bit of a punishing schedule, and because she's doing her back and I'm doing my front we're due to repeat it again next year (and probably the following year too) - a matter of racking up the hours to finish the pieces. At the moment we've got the time and money to do this kind of thing. A big part of that is not having any kids I guess.... For now : / !