Appoinment to get inked…

Yes, I’m getting a tattoo and I’ve been wanting this for a while now, so here’s my story…

First and foremost I need to give a BIG shout out and Salamat (Thank you in tagalog) to my cousin Cyrene Mary. She’s an incredible graphic artist and came up with the tattoo design, check out her portfolio website:

http://cyrenemary.com/

Cyrene designed the tattoo I will be getting inked from a Baybayin translation from pinoytattoos.com. I asked her to integrate the Filipino sun and stars from our country flag with the Baybayin text. Check it out at the end of my blog.

Last night I was fortunate enough to scheduled my tattoo appt at Humble Beginnings Tattoo Studio in San Jose, CA by a fellow Filipino artist Orly Locquiao. I get it on Friday 8/28. I love Yelp.com and it’s how I found the studio and was fortunate enough to find a talented Filipino artist to ink my design right down the road. Here’s their website:

http://www.hbtat2.com/

If you google Orly and tattoo, you find a lot of incredible art pieces done by him and some say he’s the best Filipino tattoo artist in the bay area.

So what does the tattoo represent? Well some close friends that I camp with every year (Jonn and Skip) have some incredible tattoos and I’ve always been interested in them. I’d say about 3 years ago I decided I wanted to get a tattoo that was dedicated to my Grandmother. As many of you know, she passed in December 2008 and I started doing the research.

It started as a simple translation of my Grandmother’s name in the original Filipino tribal characters called Baybayin, but then I decided to integrate all the women that are important in my life, so I included my Grandma, Mother, and my wife Melanie. You can read about Baybayin here as well as get it translated, like I did:

http://www.pinoytattoos.com/translations/

It’s a total of 4 Bababyin characters, which are Filipino nicknames:

Peday (Grandmother): Pe-da
Sa (Mom): Sa
May (Wife and another nickname for my mom): Ma

Below is the translation:

Here’s the image of the final design that Cyrene created that will be inked on my left arm: