the timboucher experience

Bret. Here is the design that I came up with tonight for your tattoo. Ideal placement, in my mind is on your chest, underneath where you would put your right hand if you were saying the Pledge of Allegiance, of like singing the National Anthem or something. Over your heart, basically. Sort of.

I wonder if this feels and as good and as right to you as it does to me. Here is kind of an explanation of how I formulated this symbol, and the processes involved.

I started out looking at the spade. The spade is a shovel, earth element. Digging down into the earth for some purpose. Whether that purpose is planting, building or burial. They are all kind of similar on some level. Also, to me, since it is held upright, I’ve always thought it looked like a leaf, which makes sense considering the idea of digging to seed and plant things in the earth.

So I did a google image search for spades. It yielded both playing cards and shovels. I saved a bunch of different images, whatever struck me for any particular reason.

After a while, I suddenly happened upon this page, with the pictures of these two black stallions. The one on the bottom is named “Ace of Spades,” and there is something about his character that reminds me of something about your character, I don’t know.

Then, all of a sudden, I had the idea to look for Chinese and other Asian drawings of horses, cause I thought they would be good references for making something very graphic. In my quest for that, i happened upon an excellent page describing the Chinese zodiac sign of the horse. I checked your birthdate, and I think you’re a goat though, but the descriptions in that page I feel like match you to a very high degree, and I’d say it’s worth reading through all of them to see what I mean.

Then I tried searching for Korean images of the horse, which were far fewer, but I found a good one from, if I’m understanding it correctly, a Korean division that was aiding American soldiers in Vietnam.

And that’s where the horse came from. Back to the spade symbol again. In the tarot deck, spades are swords, which is the air element. Swords are sometimes interpreted in dreams/myths as intellect, decisiveness and the ability to understand things by dividing them into their component parts. A good link about the knight of swords, which could be one interpretation of the horse/spade motif. As a Leo though, your signifying court card would be the knight of wands, since wands is the fire element and Leo is a fire sign.

On top of that though, you have the major arcana, which is the cards with like Death and the Devil. The super cards. The card which I think is directly relevant and had in mind all along when designing this whole thing was the Chariot. I don’t know if you remember one night before you left, we were drinking in Mick O’Sheas, and I said something about how you reminded me of the Chariot card. Wasn’t there some drunk talk somewhere along the line about you as personifying some sort of “General” archetype, also? The chariot fits with that perfectly.

Holy shit! This is the best description in the fucking world of the Chariot card, and confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt for me that this was the right symbol to bear in mind while creating this tattoo for you right now in your life. Wow.

And take a look at this. Do you know the story of Arjuna from the epic of the Mahabharata within the Bhagavad Gita? If you don’t you need to read this also. This is a direct correlation to the chariot card discussed above.

Also, to me, the horse image ties into the idea of cards, and gambling (and horse-racing), and chance, and of leaping and charging forward into blind chance, because what else is there you can do sometimes.

Anyway, yeah, that’s pretty much the idea. I can’t wait to hear back about it, cause it just captured everything that I wanted to capture for and about you.

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