On my left shoulder blade
What’s that on my left shoulder blade? A tattoo!? 😮🤯
Yep. It’s a tattoo. And the more I think about it the more meanings I find for it. Her. I named her. She’s Lyra. Apollo’s lyre. Also the name of my guardian daemon (I’ll get back to you on this bit). I wanted her for the past 5 or 6 years, but it wasn’t a priority. I knew that this would be done when the time was right. Last Christmas I got a gift card for a tattoo at Evil from the Needle from ‘my favourite 2 people in the house’, so the time has come.
I am an overthinker so, as you may expect, I turned this tattoo around time and again to find all the meanings. And I’m still pretty sure I haven’t discovered all of them. As time passes I’ll probably connect other ideas to Lyra. Probably a professional defect because I have to do that with literature all the time.
The Guardian Daemon
I was raised with the belief that there is a guardian angel taking care of me. As time passed, I started to question this (as we all tend to do, I guess) and I came to the conclusion that an angel is probably not the entity that follows me everywhere. But it certainly wasn’t a demon either. I started my research and discovered the daemon.
Daemon is the Latin word for the Ancient Greek daimon, which originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit, such as the daemons of ancient Greek religion and mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy.
I liked this concept. It’s not a good, nor a bad entity. It’s just a guiding spirit. The word ‘daimonic’ is derived from ‘daemon’ and it’s linked to the self and individuality.
(psychology) The unrest that exists in us all, which forces us into the unknown, leading to self-destruction and/or self-discovery.
(psychology, spirituality, mythology, literature) The journey and transition from innocence to experience; part of the process of individuation.
(mythology, literature) The place where light and dark meet.
Even later I learned that the main ‘character’ in what is probably the most fascinating Romantic poem in Romanian literature - Mihai Eminescu’s ‘Luceafărul’ - is also a daemon and the concept is linked to the ‘genius’ and inspiration. For a teenager with a huge passion for writing and with a strong wish to change the world, the quote that explains this poem was a revelation.
‘If the genius shall not meet death and their name shall escape the night of forgetfulness, here, on earth, they shall not be capable of making one happy, nor capable of being happy. They shall not die, but shall not have luck either.’ (my translation)
A bit of existentialism or nihilism never hurt anybody.
Lyra
After figuring out the type of entity that I could accept as a constant companion, I decided to look for a name for them. Something made me feel that this entity copies the gender identity of their protegee, so ‘they’ became ‘she’. And since daemon/daimon is linked to Greek mythology and I love Greek mythology, I started looking at name ideas around there.
Fun fact about Greek mythology: ‘The Legends of Olympus’ by Romanian author Alexandru Mitru was the first book I couldn’t stop reading. I spent a whole weekend with my nose buried among its pages, stayed up super late, and ended up reading with a torch under the blanket. I was around 11 at the time.
So, as I was looking through the mythology, I started looking at the Muses because I wanted to link this entity to my biggest passion at the time - music. I connected the Muses to their leader, Apollo, whose symbol is (among others) the lyre. The lyre has strings and so does the guitar. And the guitar is what helped me through the time my Mum was fighting cancer (here are two short posts about this: part 1 - part 2).
Thou shall be named Lyra.
Later on, when I reconnected with my passion for literature I came to realise that Apollo was also the god of poetry, which was the term used by ancient Greeks for all literature. Plus, he is the god of youth. What more can a writer & youth worker, who loves music and playing the guitar want?
The Tattoo
When I discovered Lyra I imagined her as a somewhat perfect version of myself. I saw her as powerful and balanced. Bea from 2016 couldn’t change the world, but Lyra could. And I wanted to ‘fuse’ with her, I wanted to be her.
After a while, I got into volunteering, found the strength to sing in public, and started writing my thoughts. I started my journey and transition from innocence to experience and I was pushed by the daimonic force within, leading to self-discovery. I started making an impact. One day I looked at myself and realised that I became this ideal version of myself that I saw Lyra as. Of course, I’m not perfect. At least not in a universal sense. I don’t even believe in ‘perfect’ perfection, but rather in ‘personal’ perfection, which can only be defined and measured by ourselves.
Bea and Lyra are not separate entities anymore. Lyra is now part of me in the form of a lyre on my left shoulder blade.
The Placement
(I didn’t think I’d write about this, but I just realised that the placement has a meaning too)
I chose my left shoulder blade for (what I thought to be) a simple reason - I have a scar on my right shoulder blade from a birthmark I had to surgically remove. I bonded with the scar and I wouldn’t have wanted to cover it. Plus my research showed that it’s more complicated to tattoo on scarred skin.
However, just now I realised there’s more to this. I held hands with my Mum for a long time compared to most kids I know. She was always on my right. That means that Lyra/my guardian entity was always on my left.
This should be the full meaning of the tattoo on my left shoulder blade, as of 06.05.2021.
I’ll want other tattoos in the future. The B-Side fox, something related to youth work (probably some sort of a lightning bolt, also linked to Greek mythology via Zeus), something about my ‘origins’, something about books/writing/literature (because I'm that kind of a geek 😅) and who knows what else might come up. I might replace some tattoo ideas with rings - you don’t know, but I’ve been doing this for a long time now. One thing is certain - Lyra won’t be my only tattoo and whoever comes next will have a story full of meaning, just like Lyra.
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