Irony and Body Art

The top row of "kanji's", Japanese characters, is pronounced you-kou-kan-kei, and translates into the English word "Brotherhood". No, not affiliation with a gang or club, although you could take it to have some sort of police significance. That is not it though. My brother, Matthew, and I are two peas in a pod. Where some siblings say they are so close they can finish each other's sentences, Matt and I can start them for one another. We truly have a bond that I've never seen between another pair of siblings. One night, I was searching online for an idea for my second tattoo. He chimed in on an instant messenger and we began discussing some ideas. When this idea was tossed around, I said, "Matt, I'll get it tomorrow!" He agreed in a humorous manner. "Matt…I'm dead serious." "His response was quick- My place tomorrow, 2:30PM. Well, I showed up and without hesitation we went to the tattoo parlor.

The second character is pronounced "o-too-to", and means in English, "Younger Brother." Matt got a tattoo as well. The same four kanji's of brotherhood on his arm, only with "Ani", or "Older Brother" underneath. We created an even greater bond than the one that we already had. And, it is fact that he will always be my older brother and I will always be his kid brother. That will certainly never change.

Being as close to the surgery as it was, I also had a second reason to get that particular tattoo: I now had a connection with my brother that I can take with me into the operating room. Now, Matt would be there with me, kind of like my guardian angel.

This piece I had done about eight years ago or so when I was heavily into the martial arts. Like most virgin tattooers, I knew I wanted something, but for the life of me could not decide what it was I wanted. It needed to have meaning, personally, something that would still have impact 20, 30, 40 plus years from then. I researched some sayings in some martial arts books my brother had in his extensive library. I found a saying-Ichi go ichi e-"One Life, One Meeting". Now that, I thought, had depth. We only get one shot at this life, and one meeting with any situation we face, so tackle each obstacle like you'll never have another chance and live each day as if it were your last. I liked that enough to stick with it. But I wanted a little something more. Dragons in different cultures can represent different things, different emotions or characteristics. The dragon I chose represents inner strength, a quality I thought (and still do) is of extreme importance.
So that was it. Simply put I got it done and was happy.

I got tired of explaining what the Japanese writing meant after a very short time and actually regretted getting the tattoo as well. I thought the saying would give me the inspiration to live my own life by those words but really, the only difference was I was out $120.00 and had a permanent mark on my leg.

Welcome to November 2001. A month of serious eye-opening activity. This is the month I found out, well, the reason this site was created: that I had a life threatening injury that needed immediate, and quite serious, surgery. I had been walking around with a glass neck ready to break at any given moment for an unknown amount of years. Now One Life, One Meeting was starting to take on a whole new level of meaning. If ever there was a time to conjure up all the inner strength that I could, this was certainly it. So ironically enough, eight years after that fact, my first tattoo has taken on the implication that was intended when I got it nearly a decade ago. And from this point on, that is and always will be my credo. It's almost time to have it redone and I think it's recent resurgence in importance to me calls for me to treat it to a makeover.