Thank you for asking, I would love to talk about this as it’s a question I get so often.
As a Cancerian girl growing up in Michigan around the Great Lakes, water, specifically rivers, lakes, and streams were an important part of my childhood AND I grew up with a creek behind my parent’s house. Every year my family camped on Lake Huron since I was 5 years old, we camped on the Canadian side so every night I watched the sun set over the water, Michigan invisible on the horizon.
As I’ve written about before, my dad blessed my childhood with divination tools like Tarot, Numerology and Astrology. I already had a curious mind about all things “woo” and mysterious so this found me traveling down different windy roads with topics like spiritualism, Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, quantum physics, and this eventually (as all things do) lead me to the subject of water.
I was a voracious reader and one fateful day I came upon Dr Emoto’s Hidden Messages in Water at 16 years old. Dr Emoto was a Japanese researcher who’s focus was intention and he wrote about different experiments in this book.
In one experiment they put 3 plants in a closet (in order to avoid sunlight as a variable). They watered these plants every day but for Plant 1 - the intention was to speak good things to it. For Plant 2 - the intention was to speak negative things to it and for Plant 3 - the intention was to ignore it.
Guess which plant died?
The plant that was ignored.
This blew my tiny teenage brain.
I learned an ancient truth: there is so much power in intention.
… The book carried on.
Dr Emoto and his team did experiments with water and intention where they would take water from the same source (to avoid variable) and poured the water in different glasses and taped a range of intentions to the different glasses. These intentions were across a spectrum, from “love” and “compassion” all the way to “hate” and “greed.” The researchers would freeze the water and image the crystals with microscopic photography.
What did they find?!
The researches found that the water in glasses with loving intentions taped to it formed beautiful crystals, and the glasses of water that had negative intentions taped to it had trouble forming crystals all together, they looked almost deformed.
Teenage Jess’s mind was blown again, and, as a creative person who had always used their outward appearance as their creative expression I had come to learn another truth.
If you have an intention and you wish it upon water, that water will hold and carry that intention.
My brain immediately linked “intention,” “ink,” and “water” to tattoos on the skin. ‘Maybe this is why our ancestors, who knew so much about the stars, and had rituals and ceremonies and walkabouts, maybe this is why they had been found, discovered and unburied with tattoos inked into their skin,’ teenage Jess pondered, creating the connection between tattoos and ancient civilizations. (Not surprisingly, I grew up with an interest in the mysteries of the world, like the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, Lemuria, Egypt; until growing up I realized all places are mysterious and magical, they’re just waiting for their magic to be rediscovered.)
Another fellow tattooed person, after hearing my reasoning, had a similar thought and said to me “When I started getting tattoos, it mostly felt like they were just being uncovered, rather than inked on.”
(continued after picture…)
I realized that maybe, just maybe, if I intended something… created an image of that intention, and that magic that intention contained… and inked it into my skin… could I actually change the frequency of my body, which is water and therefore holds memory?
If I ink something ancient, like the Flower of Life, the Sri Yantra, or perhaps the Unalome… does that match my frequency with the intention of that symbol, that has been revered, respected, for millenia?
Does that literally, metaphorically or even metaphysically invoke the power that the symbol has held for me and/or my life?
Can I literally harness the magic and power of the universe through intention, ink and water?
Teenage Jess cried “YES!” Twenty-year old Jess agreed and 30 something Jess still agrees, and not only that, but is so proud of Teenage Jess for making that discovery for herself and committing to it.
<3
My life has always been magic, and will continue to be nothing less than magic; maybe it’s not necessarily because of the “ink,” but it’s definitely linked to “water,” and 100% because of “intention.”
<3
Very special shout out to Janice Rodriguez for taking the time, one fateful night & stepping up to the task of counting all my tattoos - she counted 65, with room for error <3
