Well, it's been an interesting day so far. I woke up late, probably due to my evening exertions in the lab the previous day, but suffice to say I didn't get into work until about 10 am (I need to remember this is a perk). The filtering was a problem, but I was able to centrifuge the material instead, so that solved that issue. My boss dropped by and so I showed him what I had going on, and he seemed fairly happy with that. Later I reworked the high school teacher's poster rather comprehensively, but suffice to say it looks a lot better (IMHO).
Getting things together for that took most of my time, and then later in the afternoon Helena; our senior undergraduate, dropped in also. I was helping her set up a reaction when I received an email from the engineer we are working with. Apparently they had observed behaviour consistent with what we were hoping for over 4 orders of magnitude. This was big news, and so I forwarded it to the people at our end, and almost immediately thereafter I got a call from my boss. We talked about this for some time and then later he called back to go over to the Physics building together. Alas we'd just missed the necessary person, but we walked back over and talked for a while. I continued to help both the teacher and Helena, but I had to rush off as it was now about 5:30 pm.
My tattoo appointment was at 6 pm, and I figured there would be a wait because of the backlog of people due to the other tattooist going to the Sturgis bike rally. Thankfully I had brought a book “Cave Temples of Mogago” to keep me occupied while I waited. Basically they took my copy of the picture and put it onto a transfer which has some sort of ability to stick to skin. This was all going on behind me, so I couldn't really tell. It was about 6:45 pm before we were ready to go, and I will be honest that I was somewhat scared when he was about to put the first line down.
As it turned out, the pain was quite bearable, similar in intensity to facial laser electrolysis. The more unusual part was a feeling of vibrations running through the skin all over my back, but from what the tattooist said, that's normal for that part of the body. Because the design was so simple and monochromatic, it took less than 45 minutes to do and I only had to grimace occasionally. The end result didn't seem much different to the initial transfer, and there wasn't any blood visible by the time I was able to stand up and look in the mirror at it. Cycling home wasn't a problem, and in a few hours I'll take off the bandage and wash it as per the instructions.
11:45 pm – It looks good. :)