The Sound of a Daughter's Heartbeat, in Ink

I met Graham last month on Broad Street in Manhattan last month. I met him in the lobby of the building where I worked and I asked him about the tattoos on his inner forearm:

I guessed correctly when I asked him if the fuzzy line was a sound wave. "Yeah," he replied, "it's actually my daughter's heartbeat." How cool is that? I asked him to elaborate:

"I actually went to school for music and I had originally planned on getting a sine wave on my arm. And then, when I went for my daughter's first sonogram, they checked her heart and the sine wave came up on a screen and I just asked them if they could print it, and they said yes, and two weeks later I had it tattooed on my arm."

This was tattooed by Graham's friend Cheo, who is an independent tattoo artist.

The hand above/next to the sound wave was tattooed by someone else, about nine years ago, when Graham was twenty-one, at a small tattoo parlor on Merrick Avenue in White Plains. He explained:

"It's actually called the Reiki healer's hand ... Reiki is a holistic energy practice...my mother's a Reiki master, and so am I, and that's basically why I got the Reiki healer;'s hand, because it has to do with the master and working on a patient. So it was a way for my mom not to yell at me about getting a tattoo."

Thanks to Graham for sharing his cool tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

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Rebecca's Reiki Symbols of Healing

Last week I met Rebecca, who was waiting for an Amtrak train in Penn Station.

She had these tattoos on her inner wrists:


I recognized that they were kanji, but I didn't know that they were reiki symbols.

Reiki is a Japanese healing art, and Rebecca is a certified reiki practitioner.

As part of her certification and training, she studied enough to know that these symbols are accurate and refer to graphic representations of healing. Her right wrist speaks to long distance healing, and her left wrist refers to balance and healing.

Since reiki practitioners work with their hands, it seemed fitting that she had these symbols on her wrists.

She noted, as my wife has told me about her wrist tattoo, that the pain was very intense on this part of her body and that she passed out not once, but twice, in the course of having these tattoos inked over two sittings.

The tattoos were done at Gothic Tattoo & Body Piercing in New Hampshire.

Thanks to Rebecca for sharing her healing tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!