Minecraft and me…

Tell me the story behind your tattoo Helen, said no one ever… but here we are (its mostly pictures 😀 )…

I started playing Minecraft in the summer of 2014 during a really difficult period in my life. My beautiful daughter Emma was born in May that year. However, shortly afterwards I developed pretty bad postnatal depression, and struggled to leave the house for a period of time. Every afternoon during Emma’s 1-3 pm post-feed nap, I would play Minecraft on the Xbox, with her sleeping on my knee. See here, its the perfect position:

And this is when the beauty of Minecraft was brought into my life. The soundtrack, gameplay, characters, beautiful scenery, adventure, all helped restore my mental health that summer. Here’s my favourite song from the soundtrack, Haggstrom (still makes me cry):

So the tattoo? In 2020, I designed and knitted a fair isle hat for Emma, based on some of my favourite Minecraft flora. The process of getting from in-game images of the Minecraft flowers (Dandelion, Rose, Cornflower and Pink Tulip) to a complete knitted hat is shown below. 

I used the android app Stitchart (built by Caron & Jason Morris) to build prototype designs of the pattern (shown above). The amazing Chez (https://www.instagram.com/chezneychalks.tattoo/) used these images to design and ink the tattoo for me. All healed today and it looks amazing ♥.