Limes with Orange

I went and got a couple of my tattoos touched up yesterday afternoon. And I remembered that I had promised to post the genesis of my most recent tattoo:


The tattoo is a tribal sun with the Hebrew letters for Truth in the centre. I had long decided that I wanted some sort of tribal sun on the small of my back, but I needed to decide what I wanted it to represent and what design elements to add to it to make it personal to me.

Around this time, my mother was updating my astrological chart after we ordered my official birth certificate which I needed to apply for my Métis card, and discovered that the time on my certificate was slightly different than the time that my mother had previously used for my chart.

Anyway, it turns out that I have a whole bunch of planets in Virgo in my ninth house, which apparently has to do with our search for meaning, and having four planets in that house meant my search was central in my life. I read some more and I thought about things, one of them being the common themes that I have seen emerging in my scripts: "What is real?" And as everything connected in my brain, I realized that my particular search for meaning is a search for Truth. Which is when I decided to have the word Truth tattooed in Hebrew in the middle of the sun.

Now this is when things got a little freaky. Because my mother had recently told me the story of when she was young and studying acting in New York and feeling rather alone and vulnerable. Her friend Jeremiah (Hebrew scholar, drama critic and mentor) suggested that she needed a protective word, a word in Hebrew where she could visualize the letters surrounding her in a circle of protection. My mother's word was amet, spelled with the letters aleph, mem and tav, which are the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

So there I was, surfing the internet, looking for the Hebrew word for Truth and I discovered that it's amet… my mother's protective word from the beginning of her artistic career. So I thought it was even more perfect to use in a tattoo that I want to represent the future of my artistic career. Truth.

Labels: judaism, philosophy, tattoos