Why I wear my life on my skin | Damien Echols on tattoos

For Damien Echols, tattoos are part of his existential armor. - In prison Damien Echols was known by his number SK931, not his name, and had his hair sheared off. Stripped of his identity, the only thing he had left was his skin. - This is why he began tattooing things that are meaningful to him — to carry a "suit of armor" made up the images of the people and objects that have significance to him, from his friends to talismans. - Echols believes that all places are imbued with divinity: "If you interact with New York City as if there's an intelligence behind... then it will behave towards you the same way." Damien Echols is the author of the New York Times bestseller Life After Death (Plume, 2013), and his new book, HIGH MAGICK: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row. (https://goo.gl/QuN3W2) He lives with his wife, Lorri, in Harlem. Read more at BigThink.com: http://bit.ly/2sBs5Cx Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: http://bit.ly/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink 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.