I’m in the mood to design tattoos

I love, lovelovelovelove, tattoos. I am, of course, very specific about the kind of tattoos I love – for me, a tattoo is something tribal, something rooted in time, that has carried spiritual and transformative meaning to people for thousands of years. For some reason, modern styles of tattooing turn me off from that. I like black ink, and I like writing.

Right now I have five tattoos. Here they are:

coordinates for the Fiji Islands over “vinaka vakalevu”, Fijian for “thank you so much”. The dots are a marginal toss to tribal Fijian tattoos.

The number 7

Calligraphy for لا مزيد من الخوف (no more fear) done by the Shopkeeper who lived under my apartment building in Palestine.

Vinaka Vakalevu and لا مزيد من الخوف.

Dostoyevsky quote from Notes from Underground, cuneiform

“Amor fati”, a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, my favorite philosopher and mustache.

I’ve started planning a new tattoo design for my rib cage.I want to work with lyrics from Ahmad Qabour’s song “bedi ghani lin-nas” or, I want to sing to the people, that read بدي غني لولاد، بعمرن ما عاشوا ولاد، وبقيوا بهالدنيا ولاد

That roughly translates to: “I want to sing to children, who never lived as children, and remained children in this world.” It actually sounds like crap in English but in Arabic I think it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard, and carries tremendous meaning to me, as a survivor of child abuse and someone who seems destined to spend her life studying and trying to prevent oppression. Now, as a non-native speaker (and non-speaker, really) of Arabic, but someone who has studied the language for a few years and has tremendous love and admiration for it, allow me to illustrate my process of stenciling an Arabic tattoo:

1. If translating from English to Arabic, which thank God I’m not doing this time, contact at least three of my native-speaking friends to confirm that my translation is correct.

2. Send script to friend of mine in Palestine (when I was in Palestine, this step was obviously not necessary) and have him get in touch with his friends and get them to draw up a calligraphy version of the script, which he then sends back to me.

3. I then check again with a native-speaking friend that the script is accurate, before waiting to go to Phil’s studio in my hometown, where I draw and apply the stencil myself using his lightboard, making sure that I know what every mark means and where it should go and making sure that everything is there throughout the process of drawing up the tattoo.

I am incredibly neurotic about screwing up languages I haven’t mastered in tattoos – with the exception of cuneiform. That, I got off of an online dictionary, after deciding that if it was so impossible for me to find the contact info of a cuneiform expert to fact check with then, really, I think I’ll live. But Arabic is a living language, and one that, as I said, I’m very passionate about and think is absolutely amazing, so I want it to be done right. In fact, I want it better than right, since grammatically correct tattoos in Arabic can still look like total shit. Point is, there is nerve-wracking effort between “hey, that’s cool” and “hey, that’s marked into my flesh for the rest of time”.

Not so for most, apparently. According to a brilliant and scathing post I stumbled upon last night regarding bad Arabic tattoos, things like this upcoming gem happen when people copy/paste Arabic into a word document that doesn’t support Arabic font.

According to the Josh dude who runs that blog, this is a backwards, disconnected attempt to say: Beloved wife, princess protects, this is me soft (transliterated from English) I will protect. No, dude. Just no. I don’t know which poor wife suffered a mention in this monstrosity, but if I was her, I would consider that grounds for divorce. Gross. During my quest to see what other people were doing with Arabic in tattoos, I even found a photo of someone’s tattoo (that has since been removed, not a bad move on behalf of the tattoo owner) that looked exactly like the spewed Microsoft Word vomit above, and that was apparently supposed to be an Arabic translation of a Tupac quote. Here’s the kicker: the thing ran the entire way down the idiot’s arm. Why the hell would you try to translate a Tupac quote out of English into a language you don’t speak, read, or know anything about and get that permanently inked onto your flesh?

Can you even imagine what would happen if you asked Google Translate to give you the Arabic Equivalent to “Tha track hits ya eardrum like a slug to ya chest, pack a vest for your jimmy in the city of sex”? (O.O)

So, when I get the calligraphy back from my friend’s friend and have a few friends who are all native speakers of Arabic check it out, I will incorporate it into my lotus and post the design here.

I’m also tempted to put “I can live without you”, a quote from Tina Turner’s When The Heartbreak is Over and a final word to my dead, abusive, bastard father, and a testament to my own freedom, somewhere. Not sure where yet, though… It might wind up being a leg deal – though right now it’s definitely tentative.

~ by ajnebiyamejnouna on June 28, 2009.