Raise your hand if you have a stupid tattoo you regret…
Well, my hand is up. I got a tattoo when I was 16 years old (prime excellent-decision-making age) at a creepy little basement tattoo parlor in East Town Grand Rapids with my friend Natalie. She got a dolphin on her lower back (or over her bellybutton?) and I got… wait for it—
—a tattoo on my lower abdomen of Piglet from Winnie the Pooh with a Chinese symbol that supposedly reads “Virtue of the Small”… It probably actually says “Tramp Stamp” in Mandarin but I’ll never know. Especially now that I’ve had kids and it’s all wonky.
Anyway, it’s unlikely any of us could have a worse tattoo mistake than this guy that UpWorthy.com is featuring. Supposedly he tattooed the passage from Leviticus (that’s the Bible, folks!) that dictates a man shouldn’t have sex with a man as he does with a woman.
But what this dude forgot to do was read the Bible, which, just a page or so away also says this, “You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves: I am the Lord.” And guess what, I just checked my very own copy of the Oxford Annotated Bible NRSV with Apocrypha (love the Apocrypha!) and these Internet folks are right! You’re really not supposed to tattoo yourself.
Well, oops.
Dan from Zapp Laser Studios said “The irony of having that tattoo for life, and every person who sees it pointing it out isn’t going to be fun!”
“You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves: I am the Lord.” And guess what, I just checked my very own copy of the Oxford Annotated Bible NRSV with Apocrypha (love the Apocrypha!) and these Internet folks are right! You’re really not supposed to tattoo yourself.”
That’s taken completely out of context.
Wow, I just wanted to say your piglet tattoo is adorable!! So don’t regret it too much.
For anyone interested in a documentary about the Bible and homosexuality, here’s a pretty good documentary.
Anyway, yeah, I think I may have seen this photo on Facebook at some point. People are so amazingly…unaware sometimes. lol
I took an incredible course at UCLA about the Bible and Homosexuality with the unbelievably talented Norman Jones. You know, I knew that the Old Testament had a law against tattoos, and this was only ever meaningful to me because of the fact that Jews were forcibly tattooed in the Concentration Camps and to so many this was devastating as it broke Judaic Law. But not until this dude tattooed the Lev passage relating to homosexuality did I realize how physically close the law about tattoos was to the law about homosexuality! Not that proximity matters, but it seems to… Read more »
“So… in that vain… What is he reminding himself of? Or is he truly just a billboard?”
Or possibly drunk? I mean, I’ve seen some really bad tattoos out there. lol
But yeah, all of my tattoos are highly personal too, so I would assume it had to have some sort of meaning. But then again, my sister’s got a couple that she just liked. There’s no meaning to them…she just thought they looked cool. So maybe he is just a billboard.
The tattoo’d fellow is probably not a Jew but has unwisely chosen to quote from the Torah to support his argument. Although tattooing and homosexuality weren’t on the same level of prohibition, her could have just as easily quoted Paul’s writings and not ended up looking silly and uninformed. The benefit to this would be to show a consistent view between the Old and New Testaments. What I find ironic is that people criticize this text’s prohibition of homosexuality but not its prohibition of incest or adultery between consenting adults. When people pick and choose what they will and won’t… Read more »
“The tattoo’d fellow is probably not a Jew but has unwisely chosen to quote from the Torah to support his argument.”
The Old Testament and the Torah aren’t exactly the same thing. Very similar, though.
“The Old Testament and the Torah aren’t exactly the same thing. Very similar, though.”
Not usually.
Generally speaking, the Torah (aka Pentateuch) refers of the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. However, it is also often more narrowly used in reference to just the Law to the Jews given to/through Moses, which is primarily recorded in Leviticus and elaborated on in Deuteronomy.
The term Torah is and can also properly be used more broadly to refer to the entire Old Testament, although that’s now how I was intending to use it here.
Oops. Left out the book called “Numbers.” It’s sandwiched between Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
I don’t criticise the text, I criticise modern people relying on it or using it to support their arguments. It was an interesting book in its day, and got some things right, and other things wrong, but using it as a final word on ethics or morality in our more advanced society is akin to insisting on following Aristotelian physics despite the achievements of modern science.
If I were a gay man, I might get that tattoo as an ironic statement, although that’s a lot of ink for a bit of irony. Some people get tattoos because the images remind them of a particular experience. Perhaps he doesn’t believe the passage but the passage was once quoted to him in a very meaningful way or at a particular moment in his life. Someone in a car accident might get a tattoo of a car later, not as a simple symbol but as a complex one. Why do we assume the tattoo is a sincere declaration of… Read more »
Ah, so you do know what your tattoo means after all. Yup, it’s a now-somewhat-smudgy-looking De (or Te).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_%28Chinese%29
Last comment from me on this, I promise:
The good news is that a literal reading of the passage still allows for hot girl-on-girl action. Respect to the Man Upstairs.
ha!!!!
in my original version of this post I posited that as long as the man you’re having sex with doesn’t have a vagina, then you’re not technically having sex with him “like” you have sex with a woman.
But then i decided that still excludes transgendered individuals so i let it drop.
Also, as long as you don’t have sex with another man lying down, that should be okay, too. Then again, maybe lying ON a man or UNDER a man is okay as long as you are not lying WITH him.
I find that “literal” biblical interpretations are rarely literally literal.
Oh crap, I’ve been reading that passage wrong all these years. I thought it said I wasn’t supposed to tell a lie to a man like I would tell a lie to a woman. I kept thinking God wanted a gendered division of lying, that you tell different kinds of lies to men and women. Turns out it’s okay to lie to each of them the same way. That’s a relief.
Please, please, please, check with a native Chinese speaker before getting Chinese characters permanently inked into your skin. There are as many slang terms for sex in Chinese as there are in any other language. Two characters can mean exactly what you think they do on their own but when placed next to each other mean something entirely different. For example, you may want the character for good and the character representing wood, because you’re a great carpenter. The result: “good wood.” Okay if that’s the message you’re going for….
Yeah, and being how delicately one must pen the characters, you have to image with the way skin changes over 85 or so years, that the meaning could change or just become completely illegible. One guy looked at the tattoo when I was in a bikini and goes, “Don’t you think that tattoo is a little juvenile?” and I go, “Yeah, I got it when I was 16! It literally IS juvenile!” I would laser it, but it’s the old ink that doesn’t come off easily, and would be expensive and leave a scar. At this point in my life,… Read more »
You could find a passage in the bible to make any action a sin. It is the intrinsic hypocrisy of religion. I feel that this website is beyond talking about sin and can move on to talking about how to live better. One could spend their entire life trying to say all that is wrong and still never be done. It is a fallacious approach from the start. Do not live in avoidance of sin, for if we do, I am sure that our song will die within us. Come from a mindset of peace and happiness, and I think… Read more »
“You could find a passage in the bible to make any action a sin.”
While that’s obviously an overstatement, some people do try. For instance, some claim that drinking alcohol even in moderation is Biblically prohibited, even though Jesus’ first miracle was turning water into wine.
And the reverse is also true: one could use a passage from the Bible to (try to) justify just about anything, including slavery and genocide.
It’s true that Jewish Law prohibits tattoos. The difference, though, is that there was no stated penalty for doing it, unlike extra-marital (adulterous), homosexual, familial, and human-animal sex, all of which carried a very stiff penalty.
Which clearly makes it permissible…
So the tattoo prohibition is worded a lot like the don’t kill people one? Interesting…
No. Whoever told you that is mistaken.
The penalty for murdering someone was the death penalty. By contrast, tattooing was simply a “don’t do that” without a specific prescribed penalty.
So when it says, for example, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Dueteronomy 6) it is a suggestion rather than a law because it is not followed by “or you will be stoned to death.”