FKA René and Christ the Redeemer (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet is FKA René, who sent along this tattoo:

René tells us:

"I got this tattoo of Christ the Redeemer at DV8 Tattoos in Concord, CA. I was 18 at the time and wasn’t a writer then. I’ve always been drawn to religious iconography and the concept of God in the traditional religious aspect but also the belief that 'mother can be God.' The poem [below] invokes my mother as a 'master of death,' a common theme seen in much of my poetry with deals with the intersection of border violence and the weight that it carries from generation to generation. 

The Invocation

I asked mother

What is death?

She turned to the southern sun, hand on her waist

Mind on her pistol

Xibalba, land of the dead

Where the skeletons eat sweet bread

Mother

Who shot down death himself

Cracked open tombs

With black hair and

Silver steel

Killed all gods

New and old

Wisest and harshest

I asked mother

What is a god?

Victims of the night and cold steel

I’ve smashed their vials and

Temples

God is found

As the scar I wounded on your tummy

In April, on the day you

Were born

~ ~ ~

FKA René, anti-poet, miso based, AKA Young Ryan, college drop out and the Trap Bukowski tweets from @fka_rene.

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

This entry is ©2018 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading 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.net 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.

Hebrew on the Q Train (Tattoosday Plays the Alphabet Game)

After the N train, next up was the Q train (no O or P in the MTAlphabet).

3:55 P.M. Off of the N train at Canal Street.

3:57 P.M. On a northbound Q train at Canal Street.

4:15 P.M. Doubts creeping in, just about decided that this may be it. Do the Q train and then take the R train all the way home and hope for a tattoo. I would fall short of the last three lettered trains (S, w and Z).

4:18 P.M. Got off the Q at 72nd Street. Will head back on a southbound Q. This is one of the new stations on the Second Avenue subway line and they have charging docks for cell phones. My battery is at 23%.

4:35 P.M. After a brief recharge I am back on a Q headed south toward Brooklyn. I meet Joram, who piqued my interest with this tattoo in Hebrew on his forearm:

Despite my basic rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew, I couldn't quite place what this tattoo says, so I asked.

Joram told me that it means "Jesus is my Saviour," but that he left some elements off.

Had this been any other day, I may have deferred on this tattoo, but it is part of the alphabet game experiment.

It is also a perfect example of why I don't often feature tattoos in other languages. I don't know what this actually says, if anything, in Hebrew, but the name of Jesus, as far as I can tell, doesn't even appear correctly in the tattoo. In fact, this is Jesus' name in Hebrew:

In the tattoo, the closest thing to that is the word on the far left. However, it is missing a letter and, to make matters worse, is written backwards, from left to right, when, in fact Hebrew is read from right to left..

Nonetheless, the tattoo holds the meaning for Joram, and, ultimately, that is what is most important.

Thanks to Joram for sharing his work tattoo with us on Tattoosday.

The full Alphabet game can be revisited in the original post here.

Check out the next post to see if I threw in the towel after the R train, or if I persevered and finished the alphabet!

This entry is ©2017 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.