Posts tagged with "tattoo"

The Tao Tattoo

Part of The Tao Tattoo Series

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

Thumbnail: The Tao tattoo

Thumbnail: The Tao tattoo macro 

To remind me to keep my chin up.

To remind me not to sweat the small stuff.

To remind me to live in accor­dance with the nature of things.

To remind me to stay bal­anced.

To remind me to decrease my wants.

To remind me to indulge myself every now and then.

To remind me that every­thing is as it should be.

To remind me to stop com­par­ing myself to oth­ers.

To remind me not to use force against the world, and embrace the way of the uni­verse.

To remind me to fol­low my own nature, and not the trap­pings of life.

To remind me that noth­ing real­ly mat­ters.

To remind me to have no claims to life.

To remind me to be spon­ta­neous, delib­er­ate, watch­ful, rev­er­ent, hum­ble, pure, and accept­ing.

To remind me that heav­en is found on earth.

Rockstar Jeff

Thumbnail: Muted colours
Thumbnail: Sun shot
Thumbnail: Soft focus
Thumbnail: The chest tattoo
Thumbnail: Two star tattoos
Thumbnail: Blackness

I asked Rockstar Jeff, an old source of envy, if I could take a few por­traits of him.

Jeff’s very pho­to­genic, but he does­n’t agree. I’m 75% prep and 25% bad-ass, where­as he’s 75% bad-ass and 25% prep. Sometimes we joke about trad­ing styles because there’s a mix in each of us, and we always like where the oth­er ones goes with it. The truth of the mat­ter is that I could nev­er pull off his style. Anyone can do prep, but he’s got the right face, the right clothes, the right atti­tude for hard­core.

This was his hit sin­gle.

He’s the gui­tarist and scream­er. The band broke up, but he’s cur­rent­ly explor­ing oth­er musi­cal oppor­tu­ni­ties. It’s inter­est­ing to hear his oth­er projects; he’s always the front­man, but he adjusts his singing style to the band while adding his own edge.

Tattoos:

Stars on wrist

This was a mutu­al tat­too done with a friend (his “right hand” per­son), which is why there are two of them. His friend has the same tat­toos on her wrist.

Crows on right arm

As the crow is the uni­ver­sal sym­bol of bad luck, Jeff got each crow to remind him of a hard time in his life. Each one of them sig­ni­fy a moment. There’s one red one with a nail going through it, as a sym­bol that his bad luck is hope­ful­ly behind him (but he says it isn’t yet).

Daisy on right arm

The daisy is his mom’s flower. It’s not real­ly wilt­ed or bro­ken (which is what I thought at first), it’s sim­ply miss­ing petals. He got this at a time when he was real­ly angry at her, which is why it’s red. He had drawn two years ear­li­er, but only decid­ed to get it inked when she kicked him out of the house, to remind him of the hard love of fam­i­ly.

Stars on elbows

There’s actu­al­ly one larg­er star on each elbow, with the ini­tials of peo­ple com­ing out of them. They’re the first tat­toos he ever got, to remind him of the tough lessons that he’s gone through with or from these peo­ple.

Heart on chest

This one was inspired by his mom. He was mak­ing mak­ing some fool­ish deci­sions around 18, and his mom remind­ed him that he should be hap­py with him­self when he looks in the mir­ror, that there should be no hid­ing from the truth, and he should always be true to him­self.

The word “truth” is sur­round­ed by peri­ods to empha­size that it’s a strong fact in itself. The word “self” does­n’t start with a peri­od because the heart is a part of the sen­tence.

The only change he would make is to have it drawn back­wards, so he could read it when he looks in the mir­ror.

A Weekend with Darren

I had Darren over from Toronto for the week­end. We were going to do a movie marathon at the the­atre — three in a day — but the movies all sucked. Disturbia? Georgia Rule? Please. Instead, I bought the first sea­son of Six Feet Under, and we fin­ished the rough­ly 11 hour sea­son over two days. Now I can re-watch it with Bronwen and lend it to Pat. To be hon­est, I’d seen up to the sec­ond sea­son before, but I was too stoned to remem­ber most of it.

Thumbnail: Air-tight tea container

Thumbnail: Chai tea

Darren also gave me a nice tea con­tain­er. It’s rather large, since I buy my tea 50mg at a time, but bet­ter too big than too small. He also got me some chai tea, con­sid­ered a well­ness blend. When I asked him what for, he could­n’t give me a rea­son. I love gifts for no rea­son.

We shared our tat­too ideas, and his was the Chinese char­ac­ter for love on his back. Darren and Bronwen are the some of the few peo­ple I can talk open­ly with about love. We’re such hope­less roman­tics. We tell each oth­er that we’ll nev­er be mar­ried, not to be self-depra­cat­ing, but to be hon­est with our­selves. We have our ideals, and we’ll nev­er set­tle for any­thing less. It’s com­fort­ing to know that we’re not alone in our quixot­ic beliefs.