Tails From Provence

First of all, thanks to everyone who left messages here or on Facebook, sympathising over the loss of Cinny.  Social media is wonderfully supportive through the sad times, and I appreciated every word.

I’m not going to do a ‘Goals for 2017’ post, nor am I going to do a ‘2016 Retrospective.’  I’m just going to carry on blogging sporadically about my horses, my dogs, whatever is going on in my life and occasional totally random things.  I’m not going to moan about how awful 2016 was, because although it may have been a bad year for many of my music heroes and a bad year for the world in general, it was a good year for me.  We bought our house in Provence and our Year in Provence became permanent.  Woohoo!

There’s one other thing about 2016, though.  It will forever be the year I did this :

I’d been thinking about a tattoo for a long time.  Ten years ago, we had the Summer of the Swallows in Cork.  Forty eight swallow chicks fledged in our yard that year and I almost got a swallow tattoo.  I went so far as visiting a couple of tattoo shops in the city and looking at swallow pictures, but none of them looked right – they were all too stylised.

Then I saw a lady who had a couple of paw-prints up her arm.  It was simple, pretty and not too in-your-face.  That gave me the idea of mixing paw-prints and hoofprints, but of course they’d have to be barefoot hoofprints!  And then I thought there are two other creatures who have left rather large footprints on my life path…

So this is the end result.

I like to think that the lowest paw-print, which peeps out under t-shirt sleeves, is for Cinnamon.

I’m tempted to continue across the back of my neck and down the other arm.

My Mammy will have a fit!