Tattoo :-)

It was also thanks to the lovely Felipe that I now have a new tattoo! 

After years of not having any urges to tattoo again, all of a sudden during the days of the residency at Villa Alegre a design came to mind and through the days back in Santiago I roughed out a design and went to a tattoo parlor to enquire about prices, but they seemed pretty expensive and I thought to myself ‘let’s not rush it, when the moment comes the moment will come’... and sure enough the moment came! 

Felipe came back to the house one day early on in my stay with a new turtle tattoo and immediately my ears and eyes pricked up because the colours and detail were so impressive, that I immediately wondered could I go to the same tattooist, and began asking Felipe where he’d had it done.  The tattooist turned out to be the cousin of a friend of Felipe’s and it just so happened that the friend, Oscar, came to the house that night for Christian’s birthday party.  From the conversation about tattoos Oscar and I got on so well we ended up chatting until the wee hours of the morning and a few days down the line and I had another solid friend in Oscar and after a few more days I had the new tattoo , thanks to the impressive skills of his cousin Edgardo, who is so bloody good he’s won numerous awards from the Chilean tattooing convention, including first prize for ‘traditional’ category.

Edgardo is another travelling soul, taking his office of inks and machines throughout Chile and aiming to travel the whole of South America.   After the session Edgardo put on Calle 13’s documentary on their travels in South America, watch it here, it is really fascinating:

                            

Our tattooing session started around midnight and ended around 4am and there was only really one point where I felt the sensation of the needle as pain, the rest of the time by watching and concentrating and imaging the sensation as varying intensities of heat the experience was actually really relaxing!

My design began with the idea of representing the different strands of our human selves – the emotional, spiritual, physical and intellectual for example- in four different coloured circles which also have a resemblance with the Jungian model of the ego, self, consciousness and sub-consciousness.  I defined the circle design with a Celtic knot, adding in an element of my personal subconscious, coming from Irish and Scottish heritage.  The different coloured threads then leave the circles, eventually form a plait which transforms into a colourful wing  where all the colours interweave.  This part was made thinking about each of us have to find our own paths from the personal and cultural heritage that we are born with, plaiting together the different aspects of ourselves to create a strong unified whole with which we can fly in the world and in life.

The two parts I’d been unsure of, the little butterfly representing Psyche, and the strands leaving the circle, were two points where Edgardo added his brilliant artist’s eye with wicked results.  He added a touch of black in the butterfly and placed her on the wing rather than separate, symbolizing for me a connection between old selves and new.  And the threads leaving the circle he spiraled in a spontaneous manner, which seemed relevant as representing that stage of development of feeling perhaps confusion and certainty, when all the strands seem separate and we’re not sure of how of how they make sense together in one person or one pathway.  

Perhaps the plait and the wing show that strength comes when we allow the various parts of ourselves to coexist by interweaving and supporting one another in whatever way feels comfortable at any given moment in time.  When we recognise we are fluid creatures, perhaps that is when we allow ourselves to be light enough to fly.

Thanks for the wonderful tattoo Edgardo, and thanks Felipe and Oscar for connecting us.

:-)