It’s been more than a year since my last post, and my last tattoo.
Yesterday in Bali, Indonesia I got my 5th tattoo. I’m trying to get tattoos done in the places I travel. This requires me to make sure my designs are set and deliverable to my tattoo artist.
I’ve also seemed to keep up the 1 tattoo per year. Consider them touchstones, or checkpoints. I got my first tattoo after I graduated college in 2014. And every year has a tattoo commemorating each year I have grown since then.
2014: The Omega Pomegranate Peacock
2015: The Compass Rose Lioness
2016: The Hand of Khepri
2017: The Infinity Ouroboros
This year, commemorating 2018, I wanted to finalize one of two tattoos I’ve had in mind. Either my Sword of the Spirit back tattoo, or my Boots of Peace tattoo (in reference to spiritual armor from the book of Ephesians) and their related chakras. I always get the tattoo that has the most relevance during the year, and it just so happens that my Boots tattoo won out.
This tattoo combines the Bible’s Boots of Peace and the muladhara or root chakra. I’ve planned for these to coincide since I started my tattoos. I wanted a tattoo for my root chakra to be at my feet (not my pelvis) on my leading foot as the symbol of me rooting myself. I wanted this tied with the Boots of Peace so that I keep in mind that I am rooting myself in peace.
This is the first year that I have really had to set down any real roots. In 2018, I completed my first year in a career-oriented job. I have settled into my first apartment with my life partner, I am experiencing my first summer of free time to pursue my art since I was 16 years old. It’s the first year without any tumultuous transitions, and that’s really nice. But grounding doesn’t mean being unadaptable. It means rooting yourself in things that cannot be taken from you, things you can take with you wherever you go. I’ve been doing a lot of that work this year and it’s been paying off.
As you might have read from other posts, my psychosomatic illness is still a part of my life, but it’s shocking how much more control I have over it now…now that I know what it is. One of my goals this year was to use therapy and other avenues to figure out the root of this illness as well as my excoriation disorder. Not only have I found answers, I was invited to lecture on it at UCI this year. My hands, my face, my legs (most of the time) are healing from self-inflicted wounds. They look better than they ever have in my conscious life. I mean since I was maybe three years old! My body and my mind are slowly discovering peace. I can’t think of a better time for this tattoo.
So allow me to break this one down for you, in case you needed that sort of explanation. In case you didn’t just check out the photo and move on.
The Cosmic Triquetra Turtle
A. The Hopi Labyrinth
The head of the turtle, as well as its flippers are maze like, but the head specifically illustrates the labyrinth as depicted by the Hopi tribe. It’s often used for their underground sanctuaries, and its womblike meaning is not lost on most other cultures. The labyrinth has been used as a symbol for the journey to the self in many a myth and the thread that is used to navigate it by Ariadne in the Greek myth can be likened to the idea of faith. If you cling to this, you’ll know the way.
B. The Tao te Ching Quote
The fish’s gills and other markings are made up of Chinese characters for “Tao te Ching” or, crudely translated “the way of the universe” and the verse of text is the Chinese characters for 50, as a citation. The verse reads:
“The spirit of the valley never dies;
This is called the dark female.
The entry to the dark female
is called the root of Heaven and Earth.
Tenuous, it seems as if it were there,
Yet use will never exhaust it.”
I wanted a quote from an Eastern spiritual tradition. As I have quotes from the Bible and Koran and agnostic Latin already. Taoism is the closest faith I can identify with and this quote in particular talks about the entry (to the Labyrinth) of the Dark Female being the “root” of Heaven and Earth works too well, aligning with my muladhara.
C. The Dark Female Turtle
While the turtle is a symbol of wisdom for sure, it is known in Indigenous American traditions to be the mytheme of the universe’s creation. That all life is carried on the back of the turtle. This is known as the “cosmic turtle” or “world turtle”. I wanted a turtle to symbolize my Boots of Peace because of the slow and methodical nature of the turtle, but also of this cosmic universal aspect; that this wisdom comes from being one with the entire universe is more accurate for my syncretic beliefs. She is dark because she is the black of the universe. Covered in stars that you can see on her shell.
D. The Om Hrim Yantra
Also on her shell you’ll see three repeated Hindu “seed” symbols called the Om Hrim. It’s known as the combined seed-symbol of the universe. If you know the sound that is “Om” then this is the resonance innate in a being before and after the “Om”. It’s the creative energy building inside you, hoping to break free. One book on tantra in the Hindu faith describes it like this:
“Audible persisting sound is only a manifestation of the activity of the Shakti goddess. The seed sound is beyond sound. To look at is from the viewpoint of genesis, memory is the actual vehicle of enduring selfhood in the living creatures mind; indeed both our conscious and unconscious precepts, concepts and memory traces as well as the ‘world’ we construct with them are all more or less recent memories. The hidden state of the female power of mind and memory is resonance (dhvani); the outward form of which is sound. Primary resonance is the first shoot of sound and of the person’s vital force. The universe of moving and static things is knit together by this shakti, who is resonance… She is who yogis know as kulakundalini, moving inside them, continually making an indistinct sweet murmur like the humming of a bee in the muladhara.” (Rawson, 1973).
And speaking of the muladhara;
E: The Mustard Seed Eye
I have always enjoyed the imagery of a mustard seed of faith in Christian traditions, and the center of the turtle’s shell, the meeting of three fish sharing the same eye is my mustard seed. It’s also the beginning. The seed of faith, the root of all that I am. In essence, the most simple image of my roots. The fish, though, are their own thing:
F: The Triquetra Pisces
In Christian iconography, the trinity symbol is portrayed with fish is the holy trinity. However, the trinity predates Christianity in the form of a Celtic knot. Both for the Goddess, or in the north, of the god Odin. Th simple one line tracing of pisces was drawn in the ground as code for “I am a Christian” during the inception of Christian faith in Rome and other places that didn’t accept the religion. It has been dubbed satanic as well, so all can claim the symbol. For me, it is simply a unification of beliefs, my syncretism. And I love animal imagery in my tattoos, so there we have it.
G: The Turtle Shell Calendar
I looked up many different interpretations by many religions about the turtle, and the one that struck me as most uniform, both simplistic in imagery but complex in meaning, was that of the Indigenous American’s calendar: comprised of 28 days divided by 13 months. (Note the 28 sections of the shell’s rim and the 13 cells of the turtles shell). To start, this seems like a much better division of days in the year than our Roman one. As well, when discussing the Dark Female, or the idea of “the female” and their relationship to nature and the universe, the fact that those with menstrual cycle are typically in sync with the phases of the moon: the weeks and months of the year, the rotation of the Earth in our solar system, it is fitting to have a calendar illustrated with the cosmic turtle.
Even if time is an illusion, it is still felt, and I feel like this tattoo best represents the ways that the Dark Female is a part of the Oneness that we are all connected to… It is the root of us, is it not?
2019 Tattoo: Read here.
