Hey, folks. Everyone was super considerate and kind about my post the other day. I took the advice to heart, and started asking around of friends who had tattoos where they got theirs done and such.
A good friend's son's wife turned out to be a professional tattoo artist who agreed to do it for free when I told her why I wanted to get one. I just got it done today and I'm very happy with it so far. I know things change about as it heals, but I'm very happy with it. Unfortunately, I jumped at one point because it hurt unexpectedly bad in one little spot, and there's a wobble on one of the letters, but I'm okay with that for a reason:
My mom was a crocheter. Amazing work. But the thing is, when you're making thousands and thousands of stitches by hand, there's also going to be some mistake. I read once and told her, and she then lived by a rule: that mistake is where the stress escapes. If you'd crocheted a perfect blanket, you'd be afraid to use it. Can't use that! You'll mess it up! It's perfect! One little mistake makes the whole thing better sometimes.
So a real nyt letterboxed puzzle is always solvable in a words, but they give you a number to get under depending on how hard the game is that night. Generally it says to solve in 4 words. After we got our two solve (every night we made sure to solve in 2), we would use the board to make funny sentences. We spent hours playing this game each week. Sometimes hours in a single night just having fun writing out silly things.
This is likely not solvable in 2 words, though I haven't tried. Instead it spells out my mom's name (Tina Marie), and in another way, it spells out the first funny sentence my mom ever got with a particular reoccurring character named PomPom (PomPom mop popcorn, not turnips!). She and I laughed for so long over that. Made up a whole backstory of this chick PomPom who works at a movie theater and rage quits one day because they have this rocky horror style cult movie showing, and when she comes in to clean up the audience has just thrown fucking turnips everywhere, and PomPom is like "fuck this! PomPom mop popcorn! Not turnips! I'm done with this shit!"