Marked

So, yesterday I finally bit the bullet and got myself tattooed. I've had plans to do it for the last 5 years, but until now I've never had the courage to go ahead and do it. However, since I'm on leave for another half-week, I decided to bite the bullet and get it done.

I had planned to get it done as part of a coming of age ceremony, but of course I could never figure out what the rest of the ceremony would be, or even how I'd know that I'd reached the time where I'd earned a coming of age. Eventually I came to the shocking conclusion that as a boy I probably didn't need a coming of age ceremony, but more about that another time, I think.

The design itself is a two-dimensional  orthogonal tesseract,  an image that I've often used for meditation. It's meaning is a kind of personal one, related to the meditation. To me, it represents complexity in simplicity,  as all the squares and cubes resolve themselves the more you look into the image.

I was more than a little afraid going in - this was my first tattoo,  and my imagination went wild with thoughts of how painful it was going to be. But the pain was tolerable, and I was able to push right through it, and I think the results speak for themselves.

A very special day, all up!