Seeding New Symbols Tattoo Project

form here. i will check periodically for new responses! ig @gentlewound for pics :)

Thinking much abt signatures/seals/sigils/family crests // imprints & inheritance and how some of these have been lost from our lineages, for those of us whose familial or ancestral lineage is discontinuous. Lost history, lost memory on many scales (personal & communal) is something which many of us are grieving.

History has not been gentle; the violence of coerced forgetting--as a strategic tactic of assimilation, as the result of settler colonial policies of erasure, as the result of hasty departures and forced migration, as the result of being forcibly trafficked from ancestral lands, as an expression of PTSD, as the result of having ourselves incessantly disciplined out of being Ourselves, as the result of this fractured, short-termist, painfully capitalist society that tells us to move on constantly to the next shiny thing and leave behind what was precious of old.

I will b designing and tattooing personal or family sigils that i will do in my personal calligraphic style, condensing ur essence in a mark ! Will ask u to tell me stories and hang out so i can better do this.

Consider this series of tattoos a manifesto of sorts. I am not giving u a tattoo; together, we are seeding new symbols, new traditions, as ink in your bodies, for u to carry with u as u travel with you. it is a project of radical love and unyielding hope; it is a creative tactic of tapping into personal intuition, what we know, and what we do have, to reconfigure what has been lost or stolen from us into something we will carry for the rest of our lives and that can never be forgotten or thieved again.