Serenity from Anthony

I spotted Anthony's ink while biking along the Belt Parkway promenade at the end of May.

Always a fan of word tattoos, I stopped him while he was jogging and he was kind enough to stop and allow me to snap the photo above.

It was only after I got a chance to see it that I recognized the top verse as what is commonly called the Serenity Prayer:

God Grant me

the serenity to accept

the things I cannot change

courage to change

the things I can

and wisdom to

know the difference.

When I asked why he chose the Serenity Prayer as a tattoo, he said, "I think it's a good way to look at life, every day, with a positive attitude."

I am not as familiar with the passage below it

Living one day at a time

Enjoying one moment at a time

Accepting hardships as

the pathway to peace

It turns out that those four lines are the next in the sequence of the verse composed by Reinhold Niebuhr, from which the Serenity Prayer was adopted.

He credited an artist named Omar at a shop on Christopher Street in Manhattan with these tattoos. It likely could have been Tattoo Heaven.

Thanks to Anthony for sharing his tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

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Mari's Prayer, with a Twist of Math

I met Mari in front of Madison Square Garden on a sunny day in October. How could I not stop and ask her about this tattoo?

Mari explained that this is an Ananda prayer, that her friends were meditating on it for a week.

The text, which is attributed to Sri Paramhansa Yogananda, reads:

Make me thy butterfly of eternity.

I burnt my past. I ignored the foreboding seeds of sprouting destiny. I waded through the strewn ashes of past & future fears.

I am the eternal present. I tore to shreds the cocoon of ignorance with the sharpness of my will.

I am thy...butterfly of eternity, sweeping through immeasurable time. The beauty of my nature-wings I spread everywhere, to entertain everything. Suns & stardust are spread on my wings. Behold my beauty! Cut all the silken threads of thy shrouding folly: follow me in my flight to myself.

The butterfly symbolizes transformation, a phase everyone goes through at one point or another in time.

Also among her twenty-two tattoos is this formula at the top of her arm:

Mari explained she loves math and generalized that, with this equation, "you can generate anything in the universe". In theory, at least. Here, it gets a little hazy for me. Part of this tattoo contains "f(z) = z^2 + c" which is described as a complex function. Then there is the part that equates the square root of -1 to the value i. This is a formula for an imaginary number. I'm bowing out here, knowing there's no way I'll be able to explain this part of the tattoo adequately. Readers are welcome to try in the comments section, below.


Mari's work was inked by Kevin at The Tattoo Shop in Lansing, Michigan.

Thanks to Mari for sharing her tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!