Urbanized Dolphin

My cousin, a couple of years my junior, approached me the other night and asked if I can go with him to my artist and have his first tattoo done. Trying to sound and look mature to my young kin I told him that being inked for the first time is like a rite of passage… … a sign of readiness to handle the severity of something permanently being marked on you. Having two tattoos myself makes me a bit passionate on this subject.

So I asked him why he wanted to be inked. His reply saddened me.... He wanted to look cool while playing basketball and that he finds the guys on the cable show Miami Ink "way wicked". To his dismay I denied his request. I told him that I wont accompany someone to be inked just to have a cool accessory that one can flaunt.

I made the poor boy sit still and forced him to listen to my preachy ramblings about being inked. Tattoos are not accessories. It’s something intimately permanent. A commitment that should be treated with respect for it is considered to be the highest form of visual art.

Tattoos are symbols of one's journey through life. It has to have meaning and purpose. It is intimate and should be a very personal rite of passage. One's tattoos should have history.

I explained to him that my two tattoos have their history, meaning and purpose.

My first one, located just inches below my nape and at the center of my back is a two color concept design that I created and was interpreted and developed by the tattoo artist. At the center is a couple of fish swimming around a whirlpool resembling the oriental Yin and Yang Symbol, around it is a splash of water/wave and has extended tribal vines coming out of its edges. This tattoo symbolizes my "growing up" years. I got it a couple months after graduation. The yin-yang swimming fish duo stands for my parents divorce, that whatever they do they can’t seem to see each other eye to eye. It also stands for my lifestyle; fish are individuals who have infinite freedom and rot when they are caught. The yin yang whirlpool where they swim stands for the good and evil aspects of my character. It represents how I balance my personal demons and my life's successes. The splash of water means that life has a way of replenishing and washing away any painful memories and moral mistakes that I have done in the past. The spikes basically mean that I'm still growing as a person. There's more room to experience everything that life has to offer.

My second tattoo, on my right arm, is a unique design created by my mentor Direk Ipe and me. I had it done a couple of months after breaking up with my ex-fiancée. It's an inter-lapping symbol using the three letters of my nick, LUI. The inter-lapping letters U and I form a devil's pitchfork. It stands for my personal demons, my poisons and reminds me that people have the capacity to be evil. And that evil is always waiting to pop out and consume me. The inter-lapping L and I resemble a cross with an extended right segment pointing upwards. It stands for the goodness in me, that I too have some good values and only Him, the one upstairs has the sole right to judge my actions and decisions in this life. This tattoo symbolizes both the bad and the good things about me makes me who I am and what I do in life.

Being inked is not a fad. ... It's a lifestyle.

It is a way of life for the selected few. Individuals who defy conformity. Those who rebels at life’s hypocrisy and twisted moral outlooks.

My tattoos are marks made for my soul.

It marks the things that I have gone through.

Being inked is mapping out, on your mundane physicality the things and events that shape you in journey towards the mystery of what happens next after dying...