When I decided to get a tattoo, I did not want an image I would grow out of. I wanted a thesis I would still defend in fifty years, so I spent far longer on the story than on the drawing. The piece covers my upper back, inside a circle. I am color-blind, so color was never on the table. The constraint became the aesthetic: black and shades of grey, nothing else. Working inside a limit tends to produce a cleaner idea than working without one. The spine of the piece comes from Jujutsu Kaisen, where Mahito asks one question: does the soul come before the body, or the body before the soul? He separates the two and reshapes the body at will. I am not interested in the supernatural framing, only the claim underneath it: the body is not fixed, it is material we can understand and eventually edit. That is the whole of my work. Longevity is not a wish for more time. It is the practice of treating biology as something we can read, model, and reshape. The composition sets two forces against each other and resolves them in the middle. On one side is nature. A human hand reaches in from a field of galaxies, drawn at the logarithmic scale of the known universe, the map made at Princeton that One Punch Man later used as God's eye. It is the world we came from, the part of us that was not designed. On the other side is technology. A bionic hand reaches in from an arc of the human genome, compared across species and rendered as sequencing bars. It is the world we build, the part of us we are learning to author. Between the two hands sits a crystal, shattering at its base. Inside it grows a tree drawn as a circuit board: nature written in the language of technology. The two hands are not fighting over the crystal. They are shaping it together. That is the argument of the tattoo, and of the work. Biology and technology are converging on the same object, which is life itself. Read on its own, the circle breaks into six parts. The universe: the left half, a log-scale map of everything we can see. The genome: the right half, our code compared across species. The human hand: nature and inheritance, what we did not choose. The bionic hand: human creativity expressed as machinery, what we build. The crystal: the vessel where the two forces meet, breaking and reforming. The circuit-tree inside it: life encoded as technology, the fusion made visible.
