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.

21 comments

  1. Nice. So where did you end up get­ting it done?

  2. Jay @ New Moon. I told him that you rec­om­mend­ed him, and when he asked us what our con­nec­tion was I said, “blog­ging”. :)

  3. real nice man looks good your first ??

  4. Thanks! Yep, the first and only thing I’d ever want.

  5. Now I’m sure he’ll make fun of me lat­er!

  6. sweeeeeeet

    looks P.I.M.P !

  7. @Tiana — Actually, he laughed when I told him, and teased me a bit about it.

    @Darren — Your turn!

  8. It’s cool that it means so much to you.

  9. Beautiful. I‘m a Taoist as well, and I‘m con­sid­er­ing get­ting my one and only tat­too (with Taoist mean­ing) soon. Congratulations.

  10. This is amaz­ing. I had the same idea (I found this blog when look­ing up the cal­lig­ra­phy), but it may be a while before I get mine done because I’m too young. I find Taoism to be a beau­ti­ful reli­gion, and I will be get­ting the cal­lig­ra­phy done (a lit­tle small­er) on the inside of my left wrist. That and a Native American pic­ture of Kokapelli (sp?) will be the only tat­toos I get.

    • tao­ism is not a reli­gion

  11. nice =) beau­ti­ful words

  12. This is awe­some, look­ing for the pic­to­r­i­al ones though…

  13. Hi, I’m not sure how old this post is, as it does­n’t show dates.
    But I am look­ing to get a tat­too with taoist mean­ing, does the tat­too trans­late lit­er­al­ly to ‘the tao’? Just won­der­ing. Any feed­back on it from you would be appre­ci­at­ed.

    • Yep, it’s “tao”. There’s no equiv­a­lent trans­la­tion of “the” nec­es­sary in Chinese.

      • Thankyou :)

  14. every­thing you wrote here spoke to me and are things I have held as beliefs so strong­ly that I was shocked how sim­i­lar they were.

  15. Im won­der­ing if it would be in any­way offen­sive to the taoist com­mu­ni­ty to get a tao tat­too because I’m not taoist. Don’t get me wrong.…I’ve actu­al­ly read the book and I absolute­ly love the his­to­ry and the way taoists are so in tune with nature. I love the way they look at life. I also want to go to chi­na so I want to get it to remind me to nev­er give up on my dreams. What do you think? is it offen­sive or am I mis­us­ing tra­di­tion and reli­gion?

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