One is Enough

I'd been wanting a tattoo for about a decade, but it's been a frustrating struggle drafting an image that I know I'd appreciate being permanently etched into my flesh. I've tried many times, and my attempts (while I liked each design well enough at first) eventually always fell flat. The correct image finally came to me last September; I waited a good 4 weeks after drawing it before getting the tattoo. It's beautiful and simple and it references so many things that are important to me.

One of my favorite books, Fortress in the Eye of Time by C. J. Cherryh, is referred to in the script in a sort of tertiary way. The main character, Tristen, is one of my most beloved book characters of all time, and his struggle to find identity inspires me in my own.

In an abstract sense, it reminds me of the arbitrary natures of truth and illusion. I strive daily to define my own truth, to follow a path that inspires me, that is true to me, that leads toward my actualization. Truth, scripted upwards in the straight line of the clef, bisects illusion, scripted in the shape of the spiral part. Both are important, one is perhaps more convoluted and obscuring, both are difficult to discern and often masked. Perhaps they are facets of the same thing.

How does music have anything to do with them? :D

The musical symbol is the dominant element of the tattoo; most people see the clef and not the words, which is interesting to me. If a person sees the tattoo and isn't aware of the script, I won't even bother pointing it out to them. Call it a sort of test.

Even though I am tempted, I know that getting another tattoo would:

1. Render the one I have less meaningful, less singular.


2. Be slightly on the trampy side and bring other less pure motives to the forefront; motives like vanity, the desire to prove something to other people, the inclination to show off or present a facade.


3. Make me more likely to get a 3rd, a 4th - and that's usually ugly, in my humble opinion.


4. Obscure my pretty skin. So much for ditching vanity. Bah.

One is enough.

Friends have cautioned me, "Don't write about it! Don't put a picture up, it's marvelous, somebody is sure to copy it!" But frankly, I don't care. If somebody were to copy it... It would just add to the meaningfulness of the original. And the copycat's motives, in truth, regardless of whether he/she cared, would be illusory and unoriginal.

Or would they? ;) The tattoo describes and transcends even that uncertainty.