To describe and explain my tattoos, I usually need more than 5 minutes. Since repeating myself is quite annoying, here I am writing to you all that you need to know to understand why I was so crazy as to cover my chest with ink.
January 2009
The black rose and the German quote. This is quite long so let’s start with the quote.
It is an extract from the song by Rammstein, “Ohne Dich”:
„Ohne dich kann ich nicht sein
Mit dir bin ich auch allein
Ohne dich zähl’ ich die Stunden
Mit dir stehen die Sekunden
Lohnen nicht“
Translation into French :
‘Sans toi, vivre je ne puis
Avec toi, tout aussi seul je suis
Sans toi, les heures je compte
Avec toi, les secondes
N’ont aucun sens’
Translation into English :
“Without you I cannot be
With you I am also alone
Without you hours are set free
With you the seconds, on their own,
Are meaningless”
Those lyrics have had a huge impact on my life – they helped me through an awful deception – they also might have saved me from committing suicide – and now they are the main source of my inspiration. Listening to “Ohne Dich”, I wrote several poems – the most significant ones being:
“Tes paroles embrasser”, translated into German:
Deine Worte küssen
- Mit mir darfst du deine Worte küssen
Diese Worte musst du nicht vergessen
Sie werden auf meinen Brüste geschrieben
Um deinen Herz überfallen, meine Liebe zu beweisen
„Ohne dich“
Nur für dich
Auf meinen Brüste hab’ ich Ohne Dich tätowiert
Mit einer Rose, ohne Kreuz
[...]
And “Rose, flamme ou chocolat?”, which explain the reference to the black rose:
Rose, flamme ou chocolat ?
[…]
Ma rose noire exprime ma mélancolie
Que j’ai longtemps partagée avec lui.
Avec toi je voudrais les pétales compter ;
C’est avec lui que mes heures je peux ôter.
Moi, lui, nous avons notre cœur carbonisé ;
De plaisirs nous sommes mutuellement gavés.
Tu dois encore l’expérience cumuler
Tandis que nous allons la noirceur arborer.
The former poem is dedicated to Till Lindemann, who wrote “Ohne Dich” lyrics. In this poem I try to explain to him why I wanted to tattoo his words (for him to "kiss them" - metaphorically: for him to see the impact his words can have on fans).The other poem actually compares 3 types of love – the flame-like, the chocolate-like and the rose-like love. The rose-like love tends to take a meaningful colour, depending on which rose you identify with. I identify my heart with the black rose, the symbol of melancholia. The last two verses actually use the “Ohne Dich” lyrics very closely – seconds become petals in my poem.
That’s why my black rose tattoo is so close to my heart now. This is a warning for those who don’t know that I have “burnt” my heart.
November 2007
The Chinese signs: “wo ai” mean “I love” in Mandarin (reformed orthography – in Cantonese, for ex., they write “love” differently). Those signs follow the “Empty Death” in red and black tribal letters because Empty Death is the name of my favourite character in the novel I wrote, Mort et Solitaire (in English Dead and Lonely). This character is my Doppelgänger, in a sort of way – he symbolises all that I might have become if I had turned wrong: a crazy junkie full of contradictions and obsessions. Therefore, I love Empty Death as much as he loves me – the word order “Empty Death wo ai” makes the sentence kinda ambiguous.
The “t” in Death is a reversed cross made of wood and bone. You need read my novel to understand what it means. In short, it refers to a chapter, in which there is the only description of Empty Death, a skinny man, often nicknamed “Bone”.
I decided to tattoo this to celebrate my novel – I finished it right after my 20th birthday after spending 4 years working on it. It also symbolises the promise I made to the artist and my friends: I’ll publish my novel when I turn 24!
Wish me good luck!
