Part of The Tao Tattoo Series

  1. The Meaning
  2. The Experience
  3. The Background
  4. Tattwo

The tao tattoo

Concept

Some peo­ple ask me whether I feel more Chinese or Canadian. While some first-generation Canadians say that they’re nei­ther, I feel like I’m both, because I appre­ci­ate and under­stand things from both cul­tures. I have the best of both worlds.

I already have a the hanzi char­ac­ter for “tao” on my right wrist, so I got the word “tao” on my left in English. This tat­too serves two pur­poses: as an expres­sion of this dual her­itage, and as another reminder for me to fol­low the tao.

The Operation

I went back to Jay at New Moon, who did an awe­some job on my first tat­too. When I walked in, he had the lat­est Mars Volta album on, which I didn’t even know was out until that day. Most of the time was passed com­par­ing them to Tool, two of our favourite bands1.

Can you tell when he’s going over my artery? (Hint: I start to swear)

Typography

tao typography

The three-letter word is writ­ten in Avenir. As the Humanist, sans-serif type­face designed by Adrian Fruitiger (also used for the title and menu of this site), it’s my favourite font. Clean, sharp, min­i­mal­ist, and leg­i­ble. The most dis­tin­guish­ing part, as with most good fonts, is the double-story “a”, which increases legibility.

I had over a dozen vari­a­tions, at dif­fer­ent point sizes, kern­ing val­ues, and weights. I wanted the weight, size, and posi­tion to bal­ance with the one on my right wrist. In the end, I went with one that was 63.78 points, and the 35 “light” weight.

Spelling

I chose the Wade-Giles Romanization of “tao”. “dao” (the Pinyin Romanization), while com­monly accepted nowa­days, is too new for me to rec­og­nize it as the offi­cial spelling. “Dō”, the Cantonese/Japanese pro­nun­ci­a­tion, was also an idea, but it doesn’t carry the same con­no­ta­tion when relat­ing it to “Taoism” because it’s not “Dōism” (in my mind, at least).

Another con­sid­er­a­tion was the cap­i­tal­iza­tion. Most Taoist books cap­i­tal­ize tao as the “Great Way”, but I felt “tao” was less pre­ten­tious, espe­cially since there’s no sense of cap­i­tal­iza­tion in Chinese. It also bal­ances the rest of the word out nicely, as the large “T” makes it look as if the word is about to top­ple over.

Popularity

In the last few months, the most pop­u­lar searches to this site by far are for terms such as “tao tat­too”, “tao­ism tat­too”, “chi­nese wrist tat­too”, so it looks like peo­ple are seek­ing sim­i­lar ideas. The most pop­u­lar Taoist tat­too is the yin-yang by far, but it’s over­done now, even on peo­ple who don’t under­stand the concept.

I’ll have to accept the fact that more and more peo­ple are get­ting tat­toos, and that as peo­ple try to unique, some­one out there will even­tu­ally have the same one as me.

  1. Tool was a favourite until Lateralus came out, and I dis­cov­ered Dream Theater. Ænima remains one of my top albums though. [↑]