Tattooed in Beijing

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This is the story of my new tattoo...

Two of my friends and I were out one night, and we started talking about tattoos. I said I wanted to get one, one of my friends, Katie, said she encouraged it, she already has two of them. One of my friends, Orit, she didn't like the idea and had a lot of negative opinions towards tattooes. That led to a huge argument between them which was pretty entertaining, but in my mind Katie won, so I was pretty pumped on the whole tattoo thing. Then we went into Lush, a bar/cafe place which had open mic night. There these two middle eastern looking guys were on the stage playing and I was like "they look like they are from Israel." Orit, who lived in Israel before said they were middle eastern but not Israeli. Katie went to ask them to avoid another argument. It turned out the one she asked was from Jordan, I was pretty close but Orit was right(I later found out the other guy was from Jerusalem, ha!) It turned out the guy from Jordan was a tattoo artist and he was in Beijing for a big tattoo convention.

He was a pretty cool guy, a little crazy, but in a fun way. He is the only professional tattoo artist in Jordan, and by some kind of miracle he is a Christian. That's so awesome that he's from Jordan, a Muslim country and just happens to be a Christian, and a Roman Catholic at that. Once I found that out I had to get my tattoo from him. He was only in town for a couple more days. I showed him my design the next day and told him what it symbolized to me and he was really pumped about doing it so the next day he skipped his planned trip to the great wall to do my tattoo. We did the whole thing in my apartment. It was a pretty funny scene, I would never have imagined that I would be in my apartment in China getting a tattoo from a Catholic guy from Jordan. It took a while to heal and during the healing process it looked kind of weird so I was worried, but it looks good now and I really like it. It's on the back of my arm and pretty high so if I wear a not tight T-shirt it's covered. I have attached some pictures of me getting it and the tattoo right after I got it, sorry I don't have any pics of it right now, I guess you'll have to wait until I get home to see the healed product! It's similar to right after I got it done only not as vivid colors and my skin isn't red anymore. He said back in Jordan he would charge like $600 USD for a tatto like that, apparently he's kind of a big deal, and the only tattoo artist in Jordan and pretty big in Egypt too. So anyway, he said since he's on vacation and he just wanted to do my tattoo because it was a cool idea and he thought it would be fun, he charged me 1500 yuan which is like $220USD, not bad at all. He originally said $200 but since it has 6 colors and he had to use multiple different kinds of needles for some colors he had to charge me a little more just to cover what he was spending on stuff. I was happy to pay it, he was awesome and left me with a great story and a great tattoo.

I also thought I'd write a quick summary of why I chose this tattoo and what the colors mean. The cross is the Jerusalem cross. The large cross in the middle has four arms going out from the middle at equal distance, which symbolizes the four directions (NSEW) which Christianity spread from Jerusalem. The four little crosses in each corner represent the four Gospels (Mathew Mark Luke and John). I first really started to like this cross, unsurprisingly, in Jerusalem. I've thought about getting it as a tattoo ever since I went there. In the past couple years since that trip I designed it how I wanted it. I wanted it to be colorful because I really like color, as I'm sure everyone knows. So I looked up some biblical symbolic colors and here's what I decided. The big cross would be red, which symbolizes Christ's sacrifice, I thought that was a pretty worthy color for the biggest and most noticeable part since without it, what is Christianity? For the four small crosses I chose Blue, Purple, Yellow and Orange, and here's why: Blue symbolizes God and the Holy Spirit, so to me that is a good color to represent John, because in John they talk a lot about the divinity of Christ. Purple symbolizes royalty so it represents Mathew because Mathew links Jesus to the Old Testament, fulfilling Messianic prophecies of the coming King. Yellow symbolizes joy so it represents Mark because the book of Mark tells of many miracles. Orange symbolizes the Fire of God, healing and praise, so it represents Luke, which talks about social ethics. Lastly, black symbolizes sin...to be honest I just wanted a black outline because it looks good, but I think having a lot of black isn't a bad thing, sin is something we have to face every day... I think it's especially good to have in the middle of the red cross which represents Jesus' sacrifice to save us from our sins.

Well I hope you enjoyed the story of my tattoo!

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