Bones

The first Chinese calligraphy has been found carved into bones and tortoiseshell. This gave me the idea of using actual bones, soaked in Chinese ink to form characters. Each large bone forms a stroke and the smaller ones resemble the way that the image fragments as the ink in the brush runs out at the end of a stroke. The origins of the written language are being used to form modern characters meaning bones.

I’m doing a lot of research into how we see Chinese characters if we don’t understand them and came across this brilliant website “dedicated to the misuse of chinese characters in western culture”. Many of the best examples are tattoos that people have had done and don’t know what they mean. I particularly liked the guy tattood with “bitter idiot”!