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May 4, 2014, It was a rainy Sunday afternoon and whole Kathmandu was in a big rush. The roads were filled with lots of mini ponds, and people were running around, taking shelther from the rain. In that rush me and my friend were calmly on our way to thamel, to get myself inked “Hack Life”. Every tattoo has a story, so does this one. Life can be buggy and frustrating at times, we fall down, things don’t go the way we want to, we get hurt, not to say there aren’t good times too. There are plenty, but Hack Life basically meant hacking the life to run the way I want it to, if I fall down and get stuck, I want to get up and choose another path. Hacking for me means putting the things under your control and enhancing it. I wanted to remind myself I can take control of things when I am feeling low. I wanted myself to realize, it might take a while to break the code, but there will always be a way, find it and hack it to get the solution.

Anyways, we finally reached the tattoo center. They asked me what I wanted, I told them “Hack Life”, with some binary touch :). My friend designed the sample, they printed it and we were ready to go. The tattoo artist asked us what the binary part was, we told him it was a geeky touch, something I always had in life. The word Hack seemed to excite him, he even asked me if I hacked passwords and stuffs, to which I replied yeah, I used to do those stuffs and gave him an idea on how we can do such things. Then, we went to the tattoo room, and I was shown my needle. I was really excited at that point, the first touch of needle caused a stir in me. The process begun with the smaller bottom part (0110Life1011), all the time he was asking about hacking stuffs and tricks, to which we replied the best we could and even gave him ideas on how things can be done and how to be safe. Well, he was really excited to learn about those stuffs, guess even more excited than me who was getting the tattoo lol. Then, we moved on to HACK part which was big and had bold effect. The conversation was still going on, I was getting more and more excited to see the design coming to life. Then came the best feeling, the inner black filling of Hack, Its been 6 hours since I got tattoed and I can still remember that thrill. Finally, everything was completed in around 1-2 hours, we took some pictures and admired the art. It was detailed and beautiful, then he went to office and started talking more about computers, bloods were coming out of my hand and I asked for a tissue paper, and he was like oh! I forgot to put the plastic, he asked his coworker to put the plastic for me, then his coworker told me how to take care of tattoo and what to do for next few weeks. The guy in his excitement had forgotton to do that as well haha.

Well, good thing was we did get some discount, we gave him our card and thanked him and left the place. My friend then asked if I got my needle and card, I was like, “we get that?”. Haha, the guy had completely forgotton that too, he was just too excited to learn about hacking tricks and how to stay safe. Well, we enjoyed the inking process, the tattoo looked beautiful, had that geeky feel, the conversation with him was awesome. So, I can forget not getting the card and needle, but that would have been great. Sigh! only if he wasn’t so excited lol. But all in all it was a great experience and a real fine work of art. The details met were amazing, and I’d certainly would like to get more tattoos, and next time I’ll make sure I’ll get all the needle and card haha.