For some people, a tattoo is just a tattoo, and they just get them because they look cool or sometimes just out of impulse – because they can.  

But for VTSU Castleton student Aspen Wood, it was like “the universe was kind of telling me to get this tattoo.”   

Wood took a semester off school in the spring semester of 2024 with the prime goal to travel and to find herself.  

Wood was working at an olive farm in Rome for food and a place to stay for just over a week before she had come across a random girl named Skye.  

They had met at a hostel where Wood learned that Skye was a tattoo artist backpacking through Italy with the goal to meet other tattoo artists in Italy.  

In most scenarios, this is where the two people would part ways and just go on about their business like nothing ever happened.  

But not Aspen Wood.  

Solo traveling and already having a plan for where she was going from there, without even flinching or hesitating, Wood asked Skye, who mind you she had just met that day, if she wanted to travel the rest of the journey with her.  

“Yeah, 100%” Sky replied, according to Wood.  

They then backpacked together for two weeks from Rome to Milan, when Skye asked Wood if she was down to get a tattoo. 

She was wary at first.  

But after seeing the other tattoos she had done along the way, Wood said she was like “Okay she’s good.” She went all in, confident in Skye’s skills as an artist.  

Wood let her do a tattoo of the Lily of the Valley, which is a flower native to Europe and Asia.  

This tattoo was a memento to her sister’s birthday, because the Lily of the Valley is her sister’s birth flower.  

Wood showed off her pain tolerance with her first-ever tattoo landing on her ribs – and she fell asleep during process that would see most people be shaking from the excruciating pain.  

“The reason I went ribs first was because I heard that’s the most painful so everything after that would be easy,” Wood shared.  

Wood might not even feel a tattoo anywhere else as she thinks tattoos more “soothing” than anything.  

Most people tend to be wary when they meet new people, especially in a different country, but for Wood, even though she did eventually part ways with Skye, this encounter was one sewn into the skin and she will never forget.  

And she came back to the states with a crazy story to tell and a crispy rib tat.