Project for my new tattoo

As some of you know, I already have a tattoo (although less of you know where it is located exactly and even less have seen it ;-). I got it for my 25th birthday, and was supposed to represent a value that I treasured most, one that I felt was the result of my upbringing and youth. This value was "respect", and is represented by is this image, which is based on the word respect in Arabic (pronounced "ithtiraam"). A long time friend of mine who became an artist helped me rework it so it has a lot of symbolic worked into it.

Now I am working on a new tattoo, which I planned to get when I turn 30. The value that I was thinking of adding now is "balance", the sense of harmony and equilibrium, which is also linked to the symbol of justice, scales. This time I thought of using the chinese calligraphy characters but I don't feel like my research has come up with something definite. I feel like using foreign Chinese characters because of esthetic reasons, they are beautiful little pieces of art. Interestingly though, tattoos have quite a negative connotation in traditional Chinese culture. In fact, there was a belief that the body is a sacred gift from one’s parents and should not be altered in any permanent way – which of course includes tattooing.

Despite the negative connotation of the Chinese tattoo, there has always been tattooing in China. The Chinese word for tattoo is Ci Shen, literally meaning puncture the body.

The first Chinese tattoos were considered a punishment – sort of a mark of disgrace. Criminals were marked with a face tattoo and forced to live in exile. This practice is called Ci Pei in Chinese.

Even in modern China today, tattoos are considered to be connected with the underworld somehow, although this attitude is slowly changing. Despite the dubious attitudes towards tattooing, there is some evidence that tattooing and other body art are making inroads among Chinese youth today.

The Chinese pictographic system of writing was imported to Japan many centuries ago, and is known as ” Kanji ” (In Japanese, kan+ji = Chinese+word). Most kanjis have the same meaning as the original Chinese characters, but some have evolved over time in Japanese usage and the meanings are different from the Chinese characters used nowadays.

Here are some of the things I have been found regarding the concept of balance:

Pronunciation: quánhéng
balance (equilibrium)
Chinese Pinyin: ping2 heng2
Ancient symbol for balance in the sense of harmony: it is represented by the first symbol that is more like scales, then the aspect of equilibrium is added by the second:

A reworked version of it...

Bruno

(and this should be my name in chinese btw)