Tattoos for me, one of the reasons I started
to get them is because when I was in prison,
when you go to prison they completely strip
you of an identity.
You don't even have a name anymore.
You're given a number.
My number was SK931.
That means I was the 931st person sentenced
to death in Arkansas.
To the state of Arkansas I was not Damien
Echols.
I was inmate SK931.
They take your clothes, they take your name.
There were even times when I was shackled
to a chair and had my head shaved against
my will just to make you look like every other
prisoner in the prison.
They don't want any form of identity, any
form of humanity.
So I learned that pretty much everything can
be stripped away from you except your skin.
That was why I started tattooing things that
were meaningful to me, bonds I shared with
other people, friends, anyone from Johnny
Depp and Peter Jackson.
We got tattooed together to just people that
were friends of mine in the tattoo shop.
It's like if you have a photograph you can
lose that photograph.
It can be torn up.
It can be disintegrated through time.
But whenever you carry something on your body
it's almost like you have a suit of armor
made out of the things that are meaningful
to you.
So a lot of the things I have on me were not
only things that I shared with friends like
representative of bonds that I had with other
people but I started to also use talismans,
sigils.
What talismans are we were talking about thought
forms a while ago.
Well some things are really hard to visualize.
If you want to put energy into manifesting
something say, for example, happiness.
So you don't know what will make you happy.
You just know that you're not happy at this
particular time in your life.
You're not happy with your job but you don't
know what job would make you happy.
You're not happy in your relationship and
you don't know exactly what sort of relationship
you want to be in that would bring happiness.
You can use a talisman or a sigil to take
a concept like happiness and break it down
into a symbolic form that will bypass the
conscious mind and can be fired directly into
the subconscious because it just looks like
a squiggly line for the most part.
It looks like an alphabet that your conscious
mind doesn't read.
So it bypasses all of the thought processes,
goes deep into your unconscious psyche and
can then work in whatever way it works down
there.
I don't know how some of this stuff works.
I just know it does work.
If you break it down into just a symbol and
then put the energy, put the chi into that
symbol you can manifest something that you
may not necessarily be able to picture like
happiness or protection or love.
I even have one of my favorite ones is probably
the one on the side of my neck and what it
is is a talisman that represents New York
City because to me this is home.
His is the second I landed here, the second
I stepped off the plane I knew this was the
place I wanted to live and this was the place
I wanted to die.
I want to be buried here.
So and like I said earlier if you react to
something, if you interact with something
as if there's an intelligence behind it, it
will react to you in the same way.
So you can do the same thing with not only
concepts but places.
We think of for some reason people have come
to think of natural places or wooded areas
or deserts or whatever as being somehow more
sacred or more holy than urban environments.
And that's not true at all.
Everything is made out of the same divine
substance.
So either everything and every place is sacred
or none of them are.
For me I choose to approach life as if they
all are.
So if you interact with New York City as if
there's an intelligence behind it the same
way the Romans did, the same way the Greeks
did then it will behave towards you the same
way.
So I will do things like some people in different
traditions like say Native American shamanism
will interact with spirits of animals.
For me it's more along the lines of spirits
of particular trains.
You burn blue candles to communicate and link
yourself to the spirit of the C train or the
A train then it will respond to you as if
there's an intelligence behind it.
So the tattoo on my neck what I wanted to
do was sort of enshrine New York City, the
spirit of this place.
Sort of ask for its blessing, as for its favor
as I go about day to day life here.
