Oh, lovely. I was contemplating starting a tattoo thread, m'self. Thanks!
I think yours is really beautiful. Definitely doesn't seem like "future regret" material...
I've wanted a tat for a little while now. My first idea was to get a frog on my leg, the same green frog that I meet sometimes when I'm tripping on shrooms. Sometimes there's thousands of him coating every bit of the floor, in interlocking rotating pinwheels, alternately opening and closing their mouths, dancing in a rhythmic dance that if I lock my mind into it I'm rewarded every so often with these jolts of trippy pleasure straight into my brain, but if I ignore them they're just a really fun hallucination that I notice every once in a while and think of as a friend, of sorts. At least, the frog is always welcome when I see him (or thousands oh him). And the pattern is in three d, so there's a slightly less wide pinwheel on top of each last, so that at the very top there is a wheel of only three of him, then on top of them, one. At the bottom is about 18 frogs or so. The frog is very Inca or Aztec looking. The interlocking alternately rotating pinwheels of the frog also move in a pattern that very strongly evokes Incan or Aztec art in motion. It's kind of strange, I guess.
I'm going on and on about the frog, this is probably boring. Everyone has their own sentient beings and inanimate symbols that they meet when they trip and that teach them certain things. One of the most astonishing things that ever happened to me was to be describing the frogs, sober, to a friend, and as it turns out,
she saw the frogs too. That was such a trip, exactly the way I described them, she was even telling me stuff I'd forgotten to mention. We've been a lot closer since discovering we share a beloved hallucination. Even more important to me than the frog is the goddess, but she's indescribable when I'm not tripping, and to meet her is always this weird feeling of not exactly dying, but of having been switched off like a tv and sort of dissolving and then there's a "birth" of sorts and I can never remember much of the specifics afterwards, only a feeling of muteness, awe and wonder. I can't speak for hours afterwards and I always feel like I've been cruelly dropped back off into the world before I was ready. I can't even imagine how I would start to describe the goddess-or if she's even a goddess. That's just my name for her. The interactions I have with her are at a level where language goes away and everything is pure meaning, but in object form. I'm going on again and drifting off point. The point is that I could never draw the frog adequately, and I'm terrible at drawing what I see in general, let alone when I'm tripping. So I need to take a class or get a book about learning how to tell your hand to draw what you see, if I ever want to get that one done.
Just to clarify, I don't really believe in anything supernatural when I'm sober. I'm not like a Wiccan or anything-nothing against Wiccans, Christians or whatever you are. I only believe I'm talking to a goddess when I'm tripping. As far as I'm concerned it's all created by my own mind, because I'm not really convinced that it comes from outside me. The mind is a powerful thing. I'm pretty much a nondogmatic atheist-I don't really give a shit if others are atheists and I won't try to talk religious people out of their religion (did try that a lot when I was a know it all teenager tho) but I also can't really convince myself to believe in much that science can't explain, or at least measure reliably.
A more pedestrian tattoo that I've always wanted to get is one of the phrase, "This too shall pass". It would probably be in all caps, in a really unique typeface (I'm kind of a dork about fonts and will probably spend a week or two just picking the right one, I want it to have exactly the right look) and I want it to go all the way around the middle of my upper left arm (sorta like yours, Bozack) in a band, evenly spaced, with a solid black line around the top and bottom.
On either my chest or back I'd like to get a nice sketch or small portion of a painting by
Alex Grey. I already wrote him to ask permission; he wrote back and said he'd be honored, and that I should send him a good quality picture for inclusion in an art book of tattoos of his work. So I guess it isn't a completely new idea since enough people have asked him that he wants to do a book of it. His art is very spiritual and it's about opening your third eye and being one with the universe. Not in a cheesy new age way, more like his own personal lifelong project to meld yogic consciousness with a very modern sensibility. His art is really sexy and inspiring. If you're a Tool fan, he did the cd art for Lateralus and of the last minute+ of the video for Parabol/Parabola.
His sketches seem like the most likely candidates for a tattoo.
Eye of the Heart almost looks like he meant it to be a tattoo, but it isn't completely my style. I really love
The Seer and
Vision Taking Form.
I'm a lot more attached to his paintings, but much less optimistic about finding an artist who will be able to faithfully reproduce a portion. Some of my favorites are
Kissing,
Copulating,
Pregnancy,
Birth,
Newborn,
Nursing,
New Family,
Wonder,
Painting, and
Cosmic Christ. Just click around his site and maybe buy his art books, Amazon and Borders carry them. I'm just showing you the paintings I'm most into, I haven't really got a lot of idea yet which part of which one I really want to use for a tattoo, if at all.
So how does Bozack end up being called Bozack? Is there some story involved? Spill it!