Derek Shares a Tattoo, Inspired by Snake Eyes

I met Derek Ostrander earlier this week outside of Macy*s flagship store on 34th Street.

Derek is an illustrator who also works on visual installations for the department store.

It was this tattoo that prompted me stop and ask what it was about:



Derek explained that he was 19 or 20 when his friend Jay Ferrara, who is also an illustrator, inked this on a kitchen table.

The tattoo in question is based primarily on those that are sported by the Arashikage clan of ninjas and, more famously, a character named Snake Eyes, from G.I. Joe.


At the age that he got this, he thought it was particularly cool.

On a deeper level, the symbols represent hexagram #64 in the I Ching. A simple meaning is translated as thus:

Fire over water:
The image of the condition before transition.
Thus the superior man is careful
In the differentiation of things,
So that each finds its place.

A fuller explanation, from which this was excerpted, is here. Earlier this year I posted another I Ching tattoo here.

Thanks to Derek for sharing this tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

Fate Leads Me to Abundance

Sometimes Fate sends me to interesting tattoos.

My commute home generally starts at the 34th Street subway station, on a Brooklyn-bound N Train.

Sometimes, if the train is in the station when I come down the stairs, it is not clear if it's an N train or a Q train. Generally, if it doesn't matter completely, I hop on and sort it out later. Hesitation can cause me to miss the right train.

So I jumped on the train before the doors closed and then realized I was on a Q. No biggie, it's still headed in the right direction, but I decided to disembark at the next stop and walk toward the back of the 14th Street platform and wait for an N.

Halfway down the platform, as luck would have it, I ran into Sean and I had to stop and ask him
about this unusual tattoo on his inner left forearm:


This, it turns out, is from the I Ching, a classic Chinese text which includes sixty-four hexagrams, each representing a description of a state, or process. The hexagram inked here is number 42, which, as he understands it, represents Abundance and Unlimited Potential. It's literal translation is "Augmenting". There's another interpretation similar to Sean's here.

In another sense, the bars represent, in a pictographic sense, land, two mountains, and thunder and rain, which combine to mean fertility of the earth.

Sean is very much into Asian tattoos and has a piece in progress on his right shoulder. He thought about this particular hexagram for about a year and a half before heading down to Dare Devil Tattoo to get it done. The artist, Chuck Donoghue, has since relocated to Atlanta, but often returns to Dare Devil.

Work from Dare Devil has appeared previously on Tattoosday here.

Thanks to Sean for sharing his I Ching hexagram tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!