It's real alright

Since folks seem interested, here’s the long, convoluted tale of why I chose this tattoo.

When I was 8 years old, I made my first conscious decision to sin for a phoenix. I was in a Baptist school at the time, quite the square peg in a round hole. This place was pretty fundamentalist, but my home life was not, so there was a lot of friction. One of the areas of discord was the realm of mythical creatures. I adored mythology, especially unicorns.

My mom got me this great unicorn backpack for my birthday just before school started. On the first day of school, they took it away and lectured me in the principal’s office about blasphemy and graven images and all kinds of shit. It was a very crappy first day of school. Mom got the backpack back, but I was not allowed to carry it to school anymore. As “penance” for my misdeed, I had to sort books in the library. This school did not buy books, but rather took donations. Sometimes the troubled kids would be sentenced to sorting the new intake into the major categories, such as fiction, non-fiction, etc. I was sorting a box of books when I came across an old hardcover called David and the Phoenix. I flipped through its yellowed pages and fell in love with the story. It dawned on me that if the faculty saw this book, even just the title, they would throw it away. I decided to break one of the Ten Commandments, and stole the book from the Christian school library. I have it to this day.

Throughout my life, the phoenix mythos has continued to mean a great deal to me. Through years of research, I learned that the sky-bird myth is prevalent in almost all ancient cultures across the globe. The Egyptians, Native Americans, Greeks, Romans, Mesopotamians, Aztecs, Mayans, Japanese, Chinese, and many more, all have some type of great bird mythology. This means that for thousands of years, this symbol has represented something intrinsic in the human need to understand the universe. It has grown to symbolize rebirth, change, balance, harmonious relationships, art, music, beauty, and good fortune, to name a few. All of this together made the compelling argument of why this should be my mark, my talisman. I love it, and the artist did an amazing job creating the piece to my specifications. I couldn’t be happier about it.