Culture Clash and tatoos

Your tattoo image is nice, the flames are bold and evocative, but again, I find it curious when someone uses the images and symbols of another culture; do we know what these things mean? Do you feel like they represent you? Are they youre symbols, or symbols you wish were yours?


Yeah, these represent me. I didn't do a good job of explaining it in class; but I wanted a tatoo that revealed something about myself and my struggles. Perhaps that's why I ended up only making a small thing; I would have liked a full body tatoo but I believe that these should have some kind of meaning, and I couldn't find one until 2 days before the due date. The spiral is a circle made of interlacing "white" and black; that's a modified version of my personal logo, the SPEARHEAD, and these represent the two races that are within me, but white is transparent. That's because I really only have one culture. On first impressions, I'm black, and later, I'm seen as white. Never both. The sets of lines are called trigams, they are the chinese version of the cardinal directions, but they are more than that. I took a long time to decide what to put there because I wanted something from a culture that in no way represents me (I think japanese writing is cooler but I have delved into the karate world and also read manga and have a japanese dictionary and am generally interested with samurai and ninja and traditional architecture and how japanese culture is progressing towards westernization...) So the trigams. These are cardinal directions, so they are paths, they were the many options that I have to choose from, and myself as the SPEARHEAD Whirl in the middle , unable to commit to one. Also, the trigams refer to my dissatisfaction to my culture; I litterally would have to borrow my father's culture, because that's how little I am connected to it. Thus the best way to explain that was to borrow something, in this case the trigams because of their other significances. The crawling tatoo is something I've always wanted, and I wanted something that would look visually interesting. The fact that it was supposed to depict a dragon in flames has little to do with me beyond it's asthetic value; If I was an animal, I'd be a snake or a phoenix.


Perhaps once I wished I was different, but nowadays I'm coming to terms with these difficulties and what they mean for me. Thats to answer the last question.