Six months after boot camp I realized that I still wanted to get a tattoo -- I wanted to give myself a mature buffer before I got it, since it was going to be my first tattoo. I started scouting and researching, going to tattoo shops, reading magazines, looking at various tattoos that other Marines had. I started to come up with an idea of what I wanted to have -- it was frustrating at first because a lot of the tattoos I saw out there was very cartoon like, and I didn't want anything like that. Then I came across one at Captain Jacks over on Hawthorne, in Portland OR -- it was the right detail and image, I had to modify it and customize it, getting it grey scale, getting rid of some extra ornamentation.