Tuesday, February 14, 2012

ἰχθύς Tattoo

Recently, a former student asked me if I would be able to come up with some designs for a potential tattoo.  He wanted a tattoo with the ancient Greek letters  ἰχθύς (icthus).  The early Christians used the Greek word icthus which means fish as a way of communicating their faith.  Icthus was an anagram, each of the greek letters stood for a word which ended up being the phrase :  "Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ", (Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr), which translates into English as "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior".  I think that is pretty cool. Thus, the origin of the Jesus fish.  The persecuted christians, when meeting secretly, used the sign of drawing a fish in order to know they were followers of the Way.

Anyway, I have been thinking about how to go about this for a while.  I have been sketching out some ideas. A couple of my ideas are a mix of different types of letters/languages, in a way.   In the ancient early Christian church, symbolic letters and words often were a mix of latin and greek, so I thought that in the same general way, I could try my own hybrid fish. 
  A brief explanation of each of these designs follow:



The first one is traditional, although I did not actually draw the fish shape around the letters, I wanted the letters themselves to form the shape.  I added a hopefully unique tail.
The second is a basic variation of the letters, my own style.
The third was inspired by a Hobbit font.  Instead of using the greek letter Theta, I substituted the English TH equivalent.
The fourth was inspired by the Elder Scrolls font, which is a video game that I know he loves.  Again, I substituted the TH.
The final sketch is a variation of a Lord of the Rings elven font, but with the greek letters only.
I think I will find out if he likes any of the concepts, before continuing, but this has been enjoyable to play around with. 



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  1. http://ramblessilently.blogspot.com/2012/03/tattoo.html

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