Imagined Ornamentations

These are ideas for a tattoo I'm hopefully getting (so long as the winds of fortune continue to blow in the direction they have been tending in), with the larger image at right being the one I'm most heavily leaning towards. Starting at left:

"The Eye of God". Not really "god" in the Abrahamic sense, at least not when taken literally, but in the sense of "that cosmic background-impetus which is manifest in all repetitive kinetic phenomena, from thought and emotion to the winds and tides". The eight-pointed star is found in both Islam and Hinduism, in Islam it has a circle at the center and is called "Rub al Hizb", it is used to separate thematically different parts of the Qu'ran and also to end verses of poetry. In Hinduism it is the Star of Lakshmi, and as such it is symbolic of prosperity and the many different aspects of the goddess which represent various types of prosperity. The eye in the middle is meant to represent "the inner eye", and not the "all-seeing eye" that shows up on the American dollar bill. My conception of divinity emphasises the synonymy between the outer background-impetus and the inner world of the mind, so... yeah. The stuff around the star is just there to look fancy .

"Inverted Christogram". Yep, this is obvious isn't it? "IHC" is the first three letters of "IHCVC", which is "JESUS" spelled in the hybrid Greek-Latin orthography used by early pre-Roman Christians during their period of persecution. I reject the idea that modern mainstream denominations are descended from early churches, and rather believe that the Roman "adoption of Christianity" was nothing of the sort, but rather a re-branding of the "Cult of Sol Invictus" which was already ubiquitous amongst the upper classes of the Empire at the time. It's the early movements which interest me, before the defilements of Rome (fuckin' Itals ). The upside-down cross is *not* meant to show anti-Christian sentiment, but is actually the Cross of St. Peter (or as I like to call it, "the Rock Cross"), a symbol of humility before divinity. I like it because I like St. Peter, not the "guardian of Heaven's gates" mythologization of him but the actual historical figure.


Below is the "Nautilus". Does it need an explanation? It's a freakin' nautilus, drawn in a simplistic style of curved lines. No matter how much I come out of my shell I always remain a misanthrope at heart, like there's a little Captain Nemo brooding ferociously within the air chambers of the inner spiral. So yes, even this little guy has symbolism behind him.


But not as much as the last idea, which I don't have a cheeky little name for, because its meaning is complex. I will tell you what it IS before telling you what it MEANS. It is a stylized baobab tree with the rune "thorn" carved into its trunk, growing out of a tiny planet which is beginning to crumble apart due to the actions of the trees roots. The meaning is many-layered - the tree and planet are based on an illustration in "The Little Prince" [link] by Atoine de Saint-Exupery, a deeply symbolic little book which was one of the few sources of advice from my youth which *didn't* steer me wrong. In the book, the idea of people living on little planets all by themselves is used as a symbol for people's inner lives, and the plants growing on the personal planets are beliefs and interests and even sometimes the people we choose to bring into our intimate worlds. The baobabs represent mental flora which start out small and innocent-looking but soon grow large and water-hungry, soaking up the planets resources and growing out of control. The title character spends a small portion of every day checking out every sprout that grows from the soil of his planet, and if he identifies one as a baobab he plucks it out - because they can only be removed when little. If ignored, they grow and grow until they become bigger than an elephant and thrice as greedy. There's an illustration in the book depicting a planet with three monstrous baobabs encrusting it like cosmic kill-barnacles, with a little dude on top with one arm up in despair - this image is based on that. The "thorn" rune ties this entire symbolic bundle together with a different work, a song by Metallica which contains the line "This thorn in my side is from the tree I planted" (if I go with this one, it's going on my ribcage beneath my left arm, so I'll have a "thorn" on my side ). The Blind Guardian song "Thorn" and the Savatage song "Edge of Thorns" also contributed to the choice of that particular rune.