It has been well over a year since I swam the first Viking edition of Vidösternsimmet, 42km. I knew from before I finished the race that I would want a tattoo if I managed to finish. I have two from my Ironman races, and swimming 42km is up their with Ironman challenge status.

When the starting list for The Viking came out they organizers used a viking ship to indicate which swimmers would be doing the 42+km swim.

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I was not about to get a boat tattoo, so I started to search for Viking symbols, and found a Viking compass that would have made for an interesting tattoo. It would be a good represenation of an OW race since navigation is key to good OW swimming and the Viking symbols a link to a race called the Viking Edition.

Luckily for me the race organizers came out with their own new logo, and created a really cool finisher medal based on that logo. Due to Covid, a shoulder injury and lack of motivation I never got around to getting a commemorative tattoo in 2021. I finally booked a time and last week I finally got my Viking swim tattoo.

It took over an hours, but we started with the logo for the race, then looked at the finisher medal. My original thought was to go with the sword and snake image with a text 42+km. After talking with the tattoo artist (danielart.tattoo), and looking at what he could do with a photo of the medal, we decided to use the full medal as the tattoo.

The only change to the medal design was that we took the 42+km text from the backside of the medal and placed in in the water to the left of the snake where my name was inscribed.

Once the tattoo has healed I will add a new photo of that below.