Dances With Salmon

This tattoo symbolizes accomplishment. It celebrates the completion of my dissertation. In the dark hours, when I thought about quitting, the sketch of this tattoo kept me going because I knew I couldn’t get it etched into my skin until I was finished and had defended my dissertation.

I start with the salmon, my favorite animal along with dogs and bears. Each part of this tattoo has a different significance that relates to my dissertation. The water is the river as I write about a river of voices in my first chapter. The Russian word, скиталец, is the transliteration of skitaliets, which means wanderer. In my second chapter, I analyze a story called “Corazón de Skitalietz,” by José Antonio Ponte, which is about two vagabond wanderers in Havana. Skitalietz must be either Ponte’s mistaken transliteration of the word or an unknown Spanish transliteration of скиталец. The salmon, among many other things, relates to memory, a topic I deal with in my third chapter. The salmon, after wandering thousands of miles in the Pacific Ocean (it’s hard to know how far they go but scientists estimate that salmon from Alaska’s rivers may go all the way to Japan and Australia following food cycles), finds its way back to the stream where it was born by the use of smell and the powers of memory. After a long journey around the Pacific Ocean, it then begins the task of going up the river, usually various branches to what is usually a very tiny creek where its parents mated and then died. Then the salmon takes its own part in the cycle. A ring. A chain. A sacred part of life and one of nature’s greatest stories.

Thus the salmon symbolizes the ultimate in journeys, a life journey. A journey to death. What is important is not so much if we reach the goal, although that is important, but the journey and how we make use of the journey.

What makes this tattoo even more special is that the salmon and river were designed by my good friend James Martell: artist, philosopher, traveler, and compañero extraordinaire.