Tattoos

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When you spend most of your childhood in the same place, your comfort zone becomes real small. Same house, same neighborhood, same friends, same school. You know what to expect each day, every week, every month. The biggest changes are when your sibling gets married, and you have to learn how to accept a new person into your day to day life. Many people can live inside this comfort zone, thrive inside it even, but I knew pretty early on that this wasn’t for me.

Overlooking the small town I grew up in.

“Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.”

-Neale Donald Walsch

When I was 13 my brother and I were looking for for a way to make a little money in the summertime. My dad was a professor at a local college and one of his students had grown up on a farm. Turns out, the farm needed extra hands for the summer. So my brother and I packed some bags and were driven the 4 hours up into northeast Washington to work the hay fields. About 10 miles from the Canadian border on the banks of the Kettle River there was a little farm. We spent five weeks living in a caravan that got only two radio stations, learning how to drive any farm equipment necessary for the plowing, planting, fertilizing, harvesting, baling, and delivering. It was so long ago, I’ve forgotten much of what I learned in those fields, but I know this for sure; it was outside my comfort zone.

When I was 15, I was again looking for work for the summertime. This time, on the promise of becoming a ranch hand I packed my bags and headed to northeast Oregon. Upon arrival, I was told that I was not going to be able to work on the ranch, but instead I could wash dishes in a local restaurant. Already having come this far, and not wanting to return home, I took up the offer. The restaurant sat on the rim of Joseph Canyon, 35 miles from the nearest town. I was given a room in a farmhouse with a few college aged guys, about five miles away. Every morning, I would get up and walk the five miles to the restaurant. When it wasn’t busy, I spent the early afternoons scraping paint off the outside walls prepping for a new paint job. After climbing ladders in the sun for a few hours, I would spend the next 6-8 hours standing at a sink in the kitchen washing plate after plate. I have tons of stories and memories of that summer, but the one thing that stands out more than anything… It was outside my comfort zone.

The next summer, when I was 16, I bought a plane ticket and flew to the south for a month and a half. I visited friends and explored as much as I could around Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. I took a train - one of the only I’ve ever taken in the United States - from Atlanta to Birmingham. I spent weekends at basketball camps with people I had never met, and walked up and down the beach in Florida alone. It was a bit more comfortable because every week or so I’d see people that I knew, but it was still outside my comfort zone.

At 18, I packed my life into a couple suitcases and a few boxes, flew across the country, and got dropped off outside a dorm building on a college campus that I had seen one time in my entire life. Somewhere that I knew exactly four of the people on campus before arriving. To say it was outside my comfort zone would be an understatement.

At 21 years old I climbed onto a plane headed for South Africa for three months. I didn’t know anyone in the country, or even on the entire continent. At this point, what even was my comfort zone?

Overlooking Camps Bay, South Africa

At 22, I moved my entire life to a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific…

At 24, I quit my full-time job with salary and benefits in order to chase a dream I had…

At 26, I moved my entire life (AGAIN) to an unknown country in southeastern Europe…

A number of years ago, I came across a YouTube channel called Yes Theory. One of the things that drives the channel is the idea of seeking discomfort. Video after video they push themselves - and sometimes strangers - to push past their bubble of comfortability and see what kind of freedom lies on the other side.

“When we started Seek Discomfort, the lightning bolt quickly became a representation of the movement. It’s the spark that ignites when you dare to step outside your comfort zone. A sudden jolt of excitement within you when you move through fear. A flash of clarity when you realize that life is limitless.”

- Yes Theory

If life begins at the edge of our comfort zone, I want to be crossing that edge any chance I get. I’ve already been doing it for almost two decades without fully realizing it. Just looking for the next adventure has caused me to seek discomfort repeatedly. I don’t want to live a life that is too comfortable. By pushing that edge, my comfort zone grows and so do I.

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Create • Explore • Learn

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I love minimalist tattoos. Many of my tattoos are minimal, and the reason for it is two fold. First, I just like it. I like the aesthetic, and I like having a small, unsuspecting symbol that carries so much meaning. The second reason is something that is debated amongst anyone with tattoos. I know people that absolutely hate it when they repeatedly get asked what it means, and there are others that will go into every single detail, even down to the placement. As a storyteller, I love it when people ask about my tattoos. I thoroughly enjoy explaining the nuances of the different pieces.

So naturally, I’m always trying to find different ways of representing something big in a minimalist design. Which is what led me to glyphs. Simply put, they’re symbols that represent various aspects of life. They’re exactly what I like in a tattoo; small, unsuspecting symbols that carry meaning.

Create.

If you’ve found yourself reading this, it should come as no surprise that I love creating. For as far back as I can remember I’ve always loved being able to make things. As a teenager, and even at the beginning of college, I would get random work helping on construction sites. There was always something fulfilling about seeing a structure go up. Through the use of my own hands, and a variety of tools and materials, I (as part of a team, of course) constructed something that didn’t exist before.

This kind of fulfillment obviously continues in my life now, but in a more virtual space. I would love to continue creating in a physical capacity, but I don’t have the opportunities. Creating for me now is most often in video or photo form, and more increasingly in written form.

Explore.

Exploration is yet another passion of mine. One of my favorite parts of moving to such a relatively unknown country is that I hadn’t seen photos of it plastered all over the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I love New Zealand and Hawaii and all the photos people take there, but having the feeling of discovering something for the first time is unmatched. I realize that I will never be the first person to discover something, but being in Albania is as close as I can get. Swimming in lakes, chasing waterfalls, and climbing mountains that I never knew existed until recently makes me feel like a real explorer.

Learn.

It’s no secret that I am not a fan of school. I never have been. I went to college specifically to fulfill a dream of mine in playing basketball in the NCAA, but had it not been for that I possibly would have never bothered attending. As soon as I walked across that stage in 2014 there was no doubt in my mind that I would never go back into that form of education. That being said, however, I love learning.

Learning can be done in so many different environments that do not include a whiteboard, taking notes, or exams. When I finally understood this, I finally fell in love with learning. Through practical experience, through self-guided studying, and by listening to those wiser than myself I have learned far more than I would have expected. It’s possible that I have learned more outside of a classroom than I ever did inside one.

Watch me willingly let a man stab me repeatedly with a needle.

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Love = Sacrifice

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When I was growing up, my dad was a pastor. One thing we did consistently, almost every single night, was have a family worship night. Most often after dinner, all of the children that were home that evening would gather in the living room and sit around on the floor or the couch singing from a hymnal, listening to my dad give a lesson, and then do a prayer circle of whatever prayer requests we could remember from our family and community.

The format my dad used for his lessons changed and adapted a few times over the years meeting in the living room. My early memories are of him just discussing some Bible story, or biblical topic. A bit later - as most of us got older, probably - he started reading specific passages from the Bible and discussing them in more depth. But on a rare occasion, he would have something he wanted to talk about that wasn’t directly from the text. That is where this story starts.

I still remember this day clearly. He gathered us all together and didn’t open his Bible. He wanted to discuss something else. As it turned out, he was reprimanding us. I don’t know if he was speaking to one of his children specifically, but the message was clear to all of us and is still stuck in my head some 10+ years later. His message: we were selfish.

Despite not remembering the exact year this happened, it stuck with me. So much so that I thought about it constantly in college. No one ever wants to be thought of as selfish, so I decided to make a conscious effort to not be that way. I knew that when I went to college I could redefine myself. No one there knew me, so I could become whatever kind of person I wanted. I decided that I would try to base my life on one particular Bible verse:

“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”

- John 15:13 -

I was going to do anything I could to make sure no one could describe me as selfish anymore. Obviously I wasn’t going to be literally laying down my life but there were other ways to live that out. It became little things like valuing relationships with other people over whatever was at the top of my to-do list. Staying up all night with a friend so that they would stay awake to study - even though I didn’t have to study. Loaning a textbook to a classmate the night before a due date when I also hadn’t done the assignment, but knowing I could do it the next day before class. Simple things, but doing what I could to be selfless.

The tattoo wasn’t a reality for awhile after that, though. 

You see, I went to school about 2500 miles away from where my family lived. So this inspired self-development was happening far away from them. It happens anytime you no longer live around certain people, but those college years are even more impactful - especially when you’re surrounded by people that are vastly different than those you grew up with. Despite the progress I thought I had made, the people that knew before from before college didn’t seem to notice. It didn’t matter to me that they didn’t notice, but what began to sting was that most people just assumed I was the same person I had been as a teenager.

I specifically remember the day I got the tattoo done. It was in early 2017 and I was coming home from a rough day. I had been feeling the itch to get a new tattoo and knew exactly what I wanted done, but just wasn’t feeling like driving to a studio to actually do it. I walked into my house to find a couple of my siblings hanging out and within ten minutes of being inside, a comment was made about me and about what kind of person I was. Except, the comment wasn’t true. It may have been true seven years prior, but not anymore. The sibling that made it didn’t think much of it, but it stung knowing that for years I had been trying to shape myself into a new and better person and my family couldn’t see it. They saw me as the 17 year old James.

It didn’t matter that I knew I wasn’t that person anymore. Someone - that is supposed to know me well - still thought it and it threw me into a spiral of downward thinking that maybe I hadn’t changed at all. Maybe it was just in my mind. But I knew that wasn’t the case, and I wanted to have a constant reminder of that.

I almost immediately walked out of the house and drove to a shop. The artist didn’t have anyone else there so we jumped right into my piece. As he repeatedly scratched a needle of ink over my skin, our conversation wandered. He was interested in this story and as we spoke, I could see his mood shifting. He was kind and welcoming when I arrived, and over the hours sitting in the chair I noticed a new emotion coming over him. Still kind, but now pensive. Pondering.

After finishing the tattoo, he looked at me and thanked me. I was taken slightly aback due to the fact that all I had done was sit there and take pain. If anything, I should be thanking him for his artwork. But then he proceeded to open up and explain that he had stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a few months prior. He wasn’t on good terms with his family, especially his son. He told me that after our conversation, and hearing the story behind my tattoo, he felt inspired to return to AA. Not only that, he was planning on reaching out to his son who he had not spoken to in almost a year.

Love equals sacrifice. And what better representation of self-sacrificial love than to give up one’s own life, as Christ did. So, in an effort to represent Jesus’ sacrifice I chose to make this tattoo a tree - a dead tree - placed right over my heart.

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Exposure

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In the grand scheme of things, I haven’t been taking photos for very long. I can remember one specific photo I took back in high school with a borrowed camera. It was relatively early in the morning, the sun was still low in the sky, and I was walking out to my Jeep at the end of our driveway as a car sped down our gravel road, leaving clouds of dust in its wake… but other than that I didn’t give photography a thought until college. 

My freshman year of university is when Instagram was created. I remember starting to share photos of what was happening in my daily life, but I never thought of it as “photography” as much as just sharing snippets of life. I had the slightest bit of OCD which led to me looking for symmetry in my photos whenever I could. But I really didn’t give it much thought.

Years went by and I traveled around the United States a bit. Taking buses to different states or planes to different coasts, I still only shared bits and pieces on my Instagram of what I was doing and seeing. A photo of my niece in Louisville, a tree covered in hoar frost in Georgia, a photo taken by my brother of me sitting in Coach K’s spot on the bench in Cameron Indoor Stadium. Again, still not giving the “photography” side of things any thought.

That is, until, a phone call in June of 2014. I was back on campus at my school a month after graduating just to see some friends. I don’t remember the exact conversation of the phone but it had one major message; “We want you to come be an intern in Maui.” I started giving photography a thought.

After seeing so many videos and photos of Hawaii over the years, I knew that if I moved there I’d need to invest in something more than my iPhone 4S. So I bought a GoPro Hero 3+ Silver. I began practicing as soon as it arrived taking photos of the youth sports team that I was working with. I was hooked.

It took me awhile but I slowly started upgrading my cameras. My year in Hawaii was mostly documented with my phone and GoPro, and towards the end of my time there I was able to purchase a secondhand DSLR from someone I knew. Not only was I now giving it a thought, photography was my main thought.

That’s where this journey began. That’s where my Instagram changed and it was no longer just a fun way to document my daily life. I started looking at it as a business prospect, I was able to convince brands to send me products in exchange for photos. Photography took me around the world; Indonesia, Aruba, New Zealand, Nicaragua, and more. 

This little symbol is a representation of that journey. It’s an exposure meter of a camera, and every time I see it, I will think about photography and the wild journey it’s taken me on.

PS - I would be remiss if I failed to mention that I got this piece done in a little tattoo shop in Korçë, Albania. My friend Collin had come to visit and one of the stops on our adventure around Albania was to get tattoos. Funny enough, and bringing this whole experience full circle, we did not pay for either tattoo. The reason? Through my photography - and social media accounts - I promoted the shop in exchange for two free small tattoos.

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Tafelberg

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Life is never easy. This is not a revolutionary thought. But as young children we often forget that things don’t get easier as we age. Maybe it was just me, but when I was younger I just assumed that once I got to the point where I was accomplishing goals and living dreams that my life would become easy. This couldn’t have been further from the truth.

The truth is that I found myself actively living out one of my dreams and yet I was in one of the darkest mental states I had ever been. The reason is not the point of this particular story so I won’t get into it, but what is important is the bigger story. How I got out of that state, and what helped pull me from those depths.

I had just finished up a five week trip to one of my favorite places on earth, Hawaii, and was set to have yet another epic adventure roadtripping through New Zealand for the next month. For a variety of reasons I was not feeling myself, I was in a dark place and going through some of the most severe depression I’ve felt in my life to this point. Luckily for me, one of my favorite artists, Jeremy Loops, released a new album in the middle of my road trip. Jeremy Loops is a South African musician from Cape Town that I had discovered during my many hours spent watching YouTube videos and he didn’t have much music released at the time. This album, Critical as Water, was only his second album.

For whatever reason, Jeremy Loops’ music was always able to be a mood booster for me. Every time I listened to his first album I couldn’t help but to sing along with all the words that I knew. So when I was driving the backroads of New Zealand I would take every chance I could to put on Critical as Water. It pulled my mind out of the dark corners I would so often find myself in, and help lift me up.

In some small effort to pay tribute for what Jeremy and his music has done for me, I had the outline of Cape Town’s most iconic landmark put onto my wrist.

“A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to. The author is you, and the sentence is your life.”

Project Semicolon

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August 9, 2016

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August 9, 2016.

I still remember that day vividly. It was one of my first days back from Indonesia. A trip I had taken to create a video for a local business that was being funded from the US. I spend 10 days there, making YouTube videos as well as filming for the bigger project. Now I was back, in Birmingham, going back to the same office I had been going to for almost a year. Same job, same place, same people. Every day.

I knew I couldn’t handle it. The job was interesting and fun. The people were fantastic and I loved working with them. I had a comfortable office to myself with a big floor to ceiling window, and a salary higher than I knew what to do with. But I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t want the daily 9-5. The work was right along the lines of what I’d spent so much of my life doing, but it wasn’t rewarding for me anymore. I needed to find something new. I needed to find something else to work towards. I was getting too comfortable, so it was time to get uncomfortable.

That day, August 9, 2016, was the day that I was sitting in a team meeting and announced suddenly (to the others as well as to myself) that I would be leaving that job. I offered to stay on for a bit part time to help them transition to someone else, but by the end of the month I would no longer come to the office every day.

I remember the feeling I had when I walked out of the office that day and got into my Subaru for the short drive home. Sure, it wasn’t my last full time day, but that’s the moment that marked my next leap into the discomfort of the unknown.

I decided then, on the drive home, that I would never take another full-time job again unless I knew it was exactly what I wanted to be doing. I was no longer going to have a comfortable office job just because that’s what society told me I should be doing after graduating college. I knew things wouldn’t be easy, I knew it would be stressful at times, but I felt at peace. I knew I was going in the right direction.

So, I got it permanently marked on me. No turning back, only go forward. A short, simple, minimalistic reminder that I chose this life no matter what came at me. I could only move forward.

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Opacarophile

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I guess it really started when I was in college in Georgia. Living at one of the highest points around, I consistently saw some of the most dramatic and awe-inspiring sunsets. On a regular basis the sky would complete clear and I would watch the orange orb as it sun behind the horizon. It often coincided with when I was finishing dinner so I typically didn’t have to plan to see the sun setting, it just happened that way.

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Sunset chasing became part of my college life. Even to the point that after those four years I would still do it. Any time I’m back on that mountain in north Georgia I make a conscious effort to find a spot before the sun goes down so I can enjoy those moments. It often results in randomly running in to other people doing the same thing, and when I frequented those overlooks more often the people I ran in to were frequently people that I already knew.

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Unbeknownst to my college self, I would leave those mountain-side sunsets for the same experience, in a very different environment. And it was that new environment that really solidified the opacarophile in me. Not to say the sunsets from Lookout Mountain weren’t special, but watching the sun sink into the ocean while sitting on the warm Hawaiian sand just took it to another level. The sunsets I experienced in Maui have probably spoiled sunsets for me for the rest of my life, but honestly, it’s not that surprising. The sun would sink behind the waves and just when you think it was over, the clouds would explode in a grande finale that would put every 4th of July firework show I’ve ever experienced to shame.

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While the clouds really help to enhance most sunsets (assuming they’re in the right position), it’s the cloudless sunsets that really stick with me. Watching the sun drop out of the sky and disappear sliver by sliver is something that I will always love, whether it is over an ocean or the mountains of Georgia. The moment the final ray of light disappears is one that I have difficulty describing.

For about two seconds, no matter what is happening around me, the entire world falls silent. Everything stops. Every sunset comes flooding back to memory. Every person I’ve ever watched the sunset with is suddenly back watching with me again. For about two seconds, nothing matters, and the world is at peace.

It’s this feeling that I wanted to immortalize. It’s the memories of all the places I’ve watched the sun set, all the people I’ve watched it with. It’s the sense of peace I feel every time. And while it’s obviously not plausible to watch the sunset every night, I can see a representation of it on my arm. A constant reminder that despite whatever is going on, there’s a way to feel at peace.

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・・・・・ ○ ・・・・

Moving back to the contiguous 48 states after living in Hawaii for a year was odd for a number of reasons. It was strange not having the beach 5 minutes down the road, it was odd to not be swimming in the ocean at sunset every evening. While the warms nights were still present in Alabama when I first got there, by the time October or November rolled around I missed being able to sit outside after dark in a tank-top and board shorts. One thing that I didn’t expect to seem odd was the lack of tattoos.

Tattoos are everywhere in Hawaii, and it’s completely normal. You see big-time business men with their tattoo sleeves sticking out of their aloha shirts, and 70 year old uncles with chest pieces. Tattoos are a huge part of the Hawaiian culture, and don’t have the same negative stigma as they do in many places in the world. It goes back centuries and is much more deeply engrained than I would be able to explain. It is a big part of many of the island cultures in the Pacific. In those cultures, the tattoos tell stories. They show the celebrations, they show the low points. They are worn to honor children, parents, families. They represent more than just the skill of a talented artist, they show the life and history of the one that wears it.

It was with this in mind that I started getting tattoos. I wanted constant reminders of the highs and lows of my life. I wanted to be able to look at my body and remember everything that I’ve been through. I wanted stories to be told. The stories that make me who I am, the stories that have gotten me to this point: 28 and loving the life that I’m living despite whatever things have torn me down or gotten in the way.

With all of this in mind, I decided to start telling those stories through a small series of written posts. A series that will likely grow as my life goes on and I find more stories worth immortalizing on my skin.

The first I want to mention is my most recent. It is also one of the most basic, minimal, and obscure tattoos that I have if you don’t know anything about my family. I saw the idea somewhere on the internet and liked it.

If you don’t know this already, I am the sixth of ten children in my family. If I had one or two siblings I’m sure I could figure out something significant enough to get a very detailed tattoo representing both of them. But my parents made it much more difficult (because I’m sure they were thinking about my tattoos when they decided to have a big family). So I went for dots.

This tattoo is a line of dots, and one open circle. Five dots (representing my five older siblings), and then the open circle (me), followed by the other four dots (younger siblings, in case you didn’t already pick up on that theme). Something simple, and easy to explain, that could potentially be copied by my siblings, if that’s something they wanted.

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