Is your tattoo free handed or did you get an image online?

It's good that you are mindful of originality. However I can pretty much gauruntee you no matter how origional you make the tattoo somewhere someone has the same tattoo anyway. It doesn't matter anyway since tattooing is probably the worlds second oldest profession. It's been around for a long long long time. Get what makes you happy. Don't worry about others potentially having the same kind of design because others already do. If you want originality bring the idea to an artist and ask them to make it different.

There are always decent tattoo artists around almost anywhere, you just have to look for them. I live in CT and I've managed to find 6 or 7 amazing artists right in CT. But most tattoo artists would be happy to sketch up an idea, and if you don't like it they'll change it until you do like it, and most of them wouldn't take it personally if you took the sketch and went somewhere else.

My first two were images online that my artists added various details to make them less generic. My third was partly free handed and my last was an image that my artist added more shading / colour etc to and partly free handed.

Most artists will like to tweak images to make them more unique to the wearer and also to give them greater longevity. So you shouldn't need to worry about running into someone with the exact same tattoo.

A lot of the time the tattoo artist will take the tattoo you want and personalize it for you. If they do that it'll always be a little different from everyone else's.

Yes I feel it helps the artist to get a CLEAR clarification of what you want. I don't always make it look 100% like the picture of google & your artist will always suggest ideas to you to personalize it to make it more unique & fit YOU!