Tattoosday: Buddhism

Showing posts with label Buddhism. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

The Buddha on Wall Street

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Cyrus, a visitor from Olso, Norway. He had this magnificent tattoo to share with us:

Cyrus got this at 1969 Tattoo, in Oslo, from a Thai artist working there named Noi Siamese III.

"I like the art, first of all," Cyrus told me, "and I think Buddhism is inspiring."

The quality of this work is astounding, from the beauty of the lotus at the bottom, to the distinct pop of the green leaves at the top, both serving to frame the great black and gray face of Buddha. It really was a pleasure to stumble upon a tattoo as lovely as this.

Thanks to Cyrus for sharing his inspiring tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Jay, Josephine Baker, and More!

I met Jay at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade last month and she shared this cool Jospehine Baker tattoo on her right arm:

This was done by Cynthia Rudzis, owner and curator at Cirque du Rouge in Washington D.C.

In addition to this photo I took, Jay sent me photos of some additional work she has from Rudzis, on her back:

Jay tells us this:

"... is a tribute to my dad's Japanese Buddhist roots, [and] is actually a stylized version of one of the old Sherlock Holmes drawings that accompanied the original stories. The kanji [lower right] reads, 'every day is a good day'- my family's favorite Buddhist saying. Several of my family members also have it tattooed elsewhere on themselves.

The color piece at the top was taken from a 1930's wallpaper pattern and [is] used to connect the colors in my various pieces."

I was also delighted to see another photo that Jay sent me, considering I had recently been emblazoned with a crab myself:

Jay explained that this was done by Joey at Citizen Ink in Brooklyn and that "it's representative of my home state of Maryland, with a blue crab and the state motto, 'fatti maschii parole femine' or 'manly deeds, womanly words.' "

Thanks to Jay for sharing her cool tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Friday, July 10, 2015

Eugenia and A Letter (Tattooed Poet of the Week)

Our tattooed poet of the week is Eugenia:

Eugenia explains:

"I had been thinking for some years about getting a tattoo using sacred text of some kind. I believe it is the path of the poet to serve as an alchemist of language, so I felt myself drawn as a writer more toward a language-based tattoo rather than a strictly art-based one. I was thumbing through a book by John Stevens entitled Sacred Calligraphy of the East, when I saw the Siddhaṃ letter A, and I knew I had found my tattoo. Siddhaṃ is the name of a script used for writing Sanskrit during the period ca 600-1200 CE, and is descended from Brahmi and Gupta script. Of my particular seed syllable the text states:

'A is the first and most important of the Siddhaṃ characters. It is the source of all vowels and consonants; it includes and is included in every sound produced by human beings. Hence, in both a physical and spiritual sense it is the origin of all elements. It is the seed character of Mahavairocana (Dainichi Nyorai), the supreme Buddha who manifests the unity of all phenomena. A is uncreated, the primordial form of existence.'

I received my tattoo by a young man working at Lovedog Tattoo in Soquel, California in 2000."

Eugenia sent us the following poem, which said her "relates best to this tattoo [and] is a poem of transformation, with images that are Buddhist in nature ... previously published in Chiron Review.

Shing*

I used to believe I was worthless
repeated mantras to turn my blood black
my skin lusterless

I came to believe in darkness
the tumbling down to truth

a silver pearl at the center of each battered heart

I wanted to believe in one God
Ahimsa
Atman
the great returning after death

I still believe the world is round
a black hole
denser than Pound’s Cantos
too heavy for its own fortunes

still
now

I watch the stars grow heavy with light
multiply into twos and fours
a million butter lamps spilling over

golden fish throw their marks
across a thousand seas
gilding stagnant pools in their wake

magpies gather on moonlit nights
chanting their secret
oracular tomes

a lotus blossom blooms in the mire
pulling itself from Cimmerian darkness
into the shing of this pendent world

*“Shing”: Tibetan for “field,” “good place,” or “realm,” and sometimes refers to a Buddha’s paradise.

~ ~ ~

Eugenia lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in MonkeyBicycle, Cascadia Review, The Gambler Magazine, The Found Poetry Review, Literary Orphans and elsewhere. A chapbook of her prose poems, Pamyat Celo/Memory Village, was published in 2007. She is also an analog photographer and loves working with Mod Podge.

Thanks to Eugenia for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

The Tattooed Poets Project: Martina Reisz Newberry

Our next tattooed poet is Martina Reisz Newberry, who sent us this photo:

Martina "wanted something beautiful with the added blessing of Lord Buddha’s face and the lotus tabernacle." She credited Body Electric Tattoo in Hollywood, California, with the work and adds, "I love the idea of my body being a canvas for something enchanting."

Martina sent us the following poem:

LITANY

(from “Learning By Rote” Deerbrook Editions, 2012)

Who are they, these blurred figures
Longing for a digital fix?

They’ve given up peace to play at passion,
they claw at a God who keeps spiritual secrets.

(God has always kept secrets, it is we who tell
every thing we know to every one we know.)

They are us, I fear.
When does mercy kick in?

Whitman waited for mercy to kick in and,
if fame and book sales are any measure,

compassion showed itself eventually.
Whitman whispered “Why not me”

into the dark brown night of the city
and the city handed him black-eyed boys

with Spanish tongues as warm and
malleable as communion wafers.

There has to be a ripening along the way.
The dim, disturbing trail of news items

can’t be all there is to trouble our hearts.
Dante Alighieri admonished us to

“remember tonight for it is the beginning
of always,” but we don’t remember.

Death all around us folds and unfolds
like a fan. We are losing things

that were so much more negligible
than we’d ever believed.

Our skillful flippancies
reek of a bad track record

and we use ideograms for the words
we can no longer say (Mother, Father, Family).

We are orphaned in this land of
Barney the Dragon

and Beefcake calendars.
Those blurred figures—

they have regret etched into their bodies.
It’s not a good look.

Jazz bands accompany the gluttony for power
we’ve managed to encourage and we believe

every word we’ve ever told ourselves. So, then,
where is mercy or the exegesis of mercy?

Somewhere, someone is cutting hair,
dancing to the music of a twelve-string,

baking cinnamon buns, creating ideograms.
Somewhere, someone is staring up

at the enormous sky of a fallen city and
counting transgressions instead of stars.

~ ~ ~

Martina Reisz Newberry’s most recent book is WHERE IT GOES (Deerbrook Editions, 2014).

She is also the author of LEARNING BY ROTE (Deerbrook Editions, WHAT WE CAN’T FORGIVE. LATE NIGHT RADIO, PERHAPS YOU COULD BREATHE FOR ME, HUNGER, AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE: POEMS 1996-2006, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND (Arabesques Press) and RUNNING LIKE A WOMAN WITH HER HAIR ON FIRE: Collected Poems (Red Hen Press).

Ms. Newberry is the winner of i.e. magazine’s Editor’s Choice Poetry Chapbook Prize for 1998: AN APPARENT, APPROACHABLE LIGHT.

She is also the author of LIMA BEANS AND CITY CHICKEN: MEMORIES OF THE OPEN HEARTH— a memoir of her father, (one of the first men ever to be hired at Kaiser Steel in Fontana, CA in 1943)—
published by E.P. Dutton and Co. in 1989.

Newberry has been widely published in hard copy journals and on line in the U.S. and abroad. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo Colony for the Arts, Djerassi Colony for the Arts, and at Anderson Center for Disciplinary Arts.

A passionate lover of Los Angeles, Martina currently lives there with her husband Brian and their fur baby,
Charlie T. Cat. Her website is here

Thanks to Martina for sharing her poem and tattoo with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

Friday, April 4, 2014

The Tattooed Poets Project: Teresa Mei Chuc's Cross-Cultural Ink

Our next tattooed poet is Teresa Mei Chuc, who has had all of her tattoos done at Shogun Tattoo in Pasadena, California by Andrew Moore.

Teresa tells us:

"My first tattoo, in Tibetan script, is my dharma name, Rinchen Khandro, which means 'precious dakini or sky dancer' in Tibetan. The name was given to me by Wangchen Rinpoche of the Maha Vajra Center in Los Angeles during my Buddhist refuge ceremony. The name means a lot to me because it embodies my spirit and purpose in life...dancing in the sky has a deep metaphorical meaning to me. The sky also represents sunyata. I wanted it tattooed because I wanted to always remember it among all my other names (Vietnamese - Tue, Cantonese - Mei Wai, American - Teresa).

The other tattoo on my back is cherry blossoms. I found out recently through a mitochondrial DNA test that I was part Japanese and the cherry blossoms represent that part of myself. I had known that I was part Vietnamese and part Chinese; my Japanese lineage came as a surprise and I wanted to embrace that part of me and the history that is interwoven with it."

"The tattoo on my wrist is the word 'sunyata' in Sanskrit. Sunyata means emptiness, nothingness, openness. It is an important concept to me and a very important concept in Buddhism."

"The tattoo on my upper arm is a Vegvisir, a Norse protection symbol. It is a Runic compass and a symbol from the 17th century Icelandic grimoire called Galdrabok ('magic book'). I tend to get lost, so I hope this built-in compass will keep me from getting lost."

"On my leg is an endless or eternal knot, an important Buddhist symbol representing the interweaving of the spiritual path, the flowing of time and movement within that which is eternal.

I find these days, it is easier and easier to forget the important things and my tattoos help me to remember."

Teresa also sent along her poem "Pencil," which was previously published in the anthology Mo (Silkworms Ink, 2011) and in The Good Men Project:

Pencil

"In spite of everything I shall rise again:
I will take up my pencil, which I have
forsaken in my great discouragement,
and I will go on with my drawing."

- Vincent Van Gogh

A missile is shaped like a pencil -
its long, slender body and pointed
end creates history.

A girl walking down the street
a few steps ahead of her sister and friend,
two medics who were trying to help
injured people, the parked ambulance -
all were annihilated by the same weapon.

Above, drones - silent, unmanned planes.
A metal, predatory bird that shoots a missile
with precision, identifying the colors of a shirt,
the features on a face - the shape of a nose,
the color and length of a mustache.

In a room far away, in another country, a man
sits at a desk and looks at a screen; he strokes
his thick, dark mustache as he carefully
contemplates, then pushes a button.

There is a charred hole in the ground
where the girl once stood.

There are pencils that write and erase,
write and erase, so that there is nothing
to be read on the page. The page blank
as the desert sky, blank as the smooth shell of a drone.

There is a family drinking mint tea
in a living room.
The man holds a cup to his lips,
the glass touches his mustache.
A silent bird hovers above.
In a split second, everyone is dead,
the house is in rubbles - arms, legs,
splattered organs among broken concrete.

Soon, there will be no trace.

~ ~ ~

Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Saigon, Vietnam and immigrated to the U.S. under political asylum with her mother and brother shortly after the Vietnam War. Her poetry appears in journals such as EarthSpeak Magazine, Hypothetical Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Kyoto Journal, The Prose-Poem Project, The National Poetry Review, Rattle, Verse Daily and in anthologies such as New Poets of the American West (Many Voices Press, 2010), With Our Eyes Open: Poems of the New American Century (West End Press, 2014), and Mo’ Joe (Beatlick Press, 2014). Red Thread is her first full-length collection of poetry. Her second collection of poetry was just accepted for publication by FootHills Publishing and is forthcoming in 2014! Visit her at www.tue-wai.com.

Thanks to Teresa for contributing to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

The Tattooed Poets Project: Jen Coleman

The next tattooed poet to grace our pages is Jen Coleman, who sent in this photo of her adorned limbs:

Jen tells us about her body art:

"My first tattoos were the two on my wrists, which are sketches by the 20th century British poet Stevie Smith. When I was 21, I was going through a rather intense phase where I couldn't read anything but Smith's weird, deceptively-light rhymes, and I fell in love with her accompanying illustrations. Even though I'm a writer (or perhaps because I'm a writer?), I've always been averse to the idea of putting actual words on my skin, but Smith's sketches strike me as being visual poems. I chose them because they remind me of her work, which acknowledges the reality of the world's darkness while maintaining a sense of humor.

The larger ones came in the following two years. They're both Buddhist symbols--the dharma wheel [left] and the endless knot [right]. Even with reminders on my arms, I'm still pretty terrible at being present and not getting wrapped up in my own subjectivity, but the very act of getting inked was liberating for me. There's a certain freedom in handing your body over for revision, and creating change instead of resisting it."

The tattoos were done by Daniel Jones in Roanoke, Virginia. Jones now tattoos out of Asylum Studios.

Jen sent along this accompanying poem, which originally appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of New Welsh Review:

If I Answer, We’ll Crash

You ask if I think about you dying.

Of course I do. It doesn’t stop me—in fact,

it spurs me on. Wined up, we’re driving

through the mountains and I’m contriving

some glib response to your black

question. Either one of us could die

tomorrow and here you are trying

to anticipate the future, retract

the burning autumnal present, driving

toward some theoretical that deprives

us of now. Somehow, the trees are exactly

right in their urgency. I’m dying

to bring it to its crisis, vying

against awkward circumstance to act

and breach the barrier, break this driving

strain, force the endless separate sighing

to its orange, inevitable impact.

You ask if I think about you dying.

Of course I do. But you’re driving.

~ ~ ~

Jen Coleman was a finalist for The Poetry Foundation’s 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships. Her work has appeared in The Southeast Review, New Welsh Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Vinyl Poetry, DIALOGIST, Buddhist Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Hollins University and lives in Roanoke, Virginia, with her two Manx cats.