"Ink," the origin and meaning of his tattoos...

[Malador]

Looked up Kanji until I came across the symbol and copy pasted it.

[Red Shirt]

The second picture you have linked reminds me of a simplified pictogram used to display viruses; but I don't say that this is the meaning in this context.

That is something that I have considered too, given that there is an entire family of viruses that actually look like that. The Bacteriophage(s) to be specific. Those little nasties look like this:
500x_t4bacteriophage.jpg
However, for the moment, I am led to believe that it is more likely to be a chemical symbol. I was doing some parallel research, both for my own curiosity and to update another post of mine here... when the wiki hole went from base pairs to DNA to Amino acids and there, the chemical symbols were illustrated for the twenty one amino acids (found in Eukaryotes) and I latched onto the Proline when I saw it.

Given this discussion, I decided to take a closer look and noticed something I overlooked before and inadvertently covered up with my trace job. Let me clean it up a little:
towtm working copy3a.jpg
It looks like there was a second line in there, representing a double carbon bond. This further suggests that this might not be Proline, as it does not have a double bond in its structure. (The pentagonal structure is also not entirely carbon, it has a nitrogen group on one corner.)
This may in actuality be an isomer of Cyclopentane, perhaps even hydrogenated.

Thanks for the reminder about GIMP. I just need to summon up the courage to pull the trigger. For what I want to do though, I kinda need a drawing tablet. I just might go "old school" and have the picture printed, then trace onto transparency slides and scan them.

This might help slightly...

Wow KC, thanks! @Witch_Doctor: Rosetta Stone indeed.

@Malador & @scbubba... Very interesting... food for thought while I'm at work tomorrow. Hmm, Ward... I wonder what TOWTM could be warding against.

Well, I can't wait until my next day off so I can devote a fair bit of time to this... or at least a day where I don't get off at ass-o'clock at night.

Oh, and FYI, I don't have a basement room with a bulletin board wall with pictures tacked up and colored yarn connecting them.
Yet.

[YetAnotherBloodyCheek]

Oh, this thread reminds me a lot of those crypto analysis lessons back at university.

Well, the old Egyptians used to tattoo a slave's head with secret messages - but they also had the decency to wait until the hair had grown back.

[LiamKerrington]

Mh. Symbols of protection.
Is this a statement about his personal agenda?
Or was it a statement about his personal agenda BEFORE he became a zombie ... And did the purpose of this symbole carry over into his zombie-state?

Best wishes!
Liam

[Witch_Doctor]

Oh, and FYI, I don't have a basement room with a bulletin board wall with pictures tacked up and colored yarn connecting them.
Yet.

Suuurrrreeee you don't.

[Malador]

There is another Damballah-Wedo veve on the lower left hand corner of Ink's face
Damballah Wedo.png
It's hard to make out but compare it to :http://altreligion.about.com/od/symb...allah-Wedo.htm

a symbol very similar to the second veve for Ogoun is on the top of his head
Ogoun.jpg
Compare to the bottom part of:http://altreligion.about.com/od/symb...n--Image-2.htm'

The alchemical symbol for sulphur, the triangle above a cross, appears above his left eye. The symbol for silver or the Armanen rune for human/birth, three lines extending out upward from a central point, is directly below it. The symbol for salt or water, a circle with a horizontal line through it, is on his right nostril,and I KNOW I have seen the X's with the line through them before, as they appear on his left nostril, but I can't remember what it means.

The eye of Horus in reverse, located below his right eye, represents the moon and the Egyptian god of magic, Thoth. The circumpunct to the right of the Ogoun symbol on top of his head historically stood for the sun.

[Red Shirt]

There is another Damballah-Wedo veve on the lower left hand corner of Ink's face
Damballah Wedo.png
It's hard to make out but compare it to :http://altreligion.about.com/od/symb...allah-Wedo.htm

If you look to the right, along the cleft of his chin, you can see the other of the two snakes that comprise the Damballah-Wedo Veve.

When I jumped in tonight, I was hoping to make some connections and I did, but not where I had hoped. This seems to have opened up more questions... on the right side of his skull, the symbol looks remarkably like this Veve for Erzulie:
tumblr_ma9l1vl6jr1rnc22xo1_500.jpg
More specifically the Maîtresse Mambo Erzulie Fréda Dahomey aspect. She is said to wear three wedding bands, one for each of her husbands: Damballa, Ogoun and Agwe...

Damballa, check. Oogoun, check. Agwe... his Veve looks like this:
agwe-taroyo-mine.jpg

And that's just one side...

I wonder what we might find on the back of his skull...

Something I'd like to point out is that Damballa, Oogoun, Agwe and Erzulie are counted among the Rada Loa Nanchon... beneficent elder gods/spirits/forces of creation, craftsmanship and the elements...

I mentioned previously (obliquely) what seems to be the presence of Solomonic magic talismans. Well, I was able to conduct some research at the library the other day and discovered that (in addition to the Christian influence) there seems to be the presence of Judaic influence in Voodoo magic. Notably, the presence of (ancient?) Hebrew and that many of the Veves and other talismans also bear some resemblance to those found in the Key of Solomon. This needs more work though, perhaps tomorrow I will be able to read up more on the subjects and be able to connect them better.

[Red Shirt]

I wanted to back up and try to take a fresh look at all of this... and boy, I'm glad that I want back through the older posts.

Papa Legba is the intermediary between humans and the Loa. This is one of his veves. http://altreligion.about.com/od/symb...es/Legba-2.htm Notice that this is the same as the image on the lower part of Pinstripe's hand, nearest to the rist.

Turns out I rep'd that post already... wish I could again, so here's a +1 thumb for you.

This highlighted segment here, the boxes denote blured areas I couldn't figure out until I re-read Witch_Doctor's post:
hand1.jpg
Matches this Veve:
papa legba.jpg

Not just an "intermediary," it must be said. He's the Gatekeeper to the spirit world, Vilokan and a bridge between the two.

Legba is also strongly associated with the sun and is seen as a life-giver, transferring the power of Bondye to the material world and all that lives within it.
His association with creation, generation and life makes him a common lwa to approach with matters of sex, and his position as a conduit of Bondye's will makes him a lwa of order and destiny.

I'll also note that this tattoo is on his right hand. (The hand of strength, power, ect. I tried web searching for right hand myths and all I got was lefties. Stupid Google.)

A revelation I had at work the other day, an actual connection rather than throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, is that:

This seems to suggest that with the power of Papa Legba in his hand, he (thinks he) is using the power of Bondye and the spirit realm for creation as he sees fit.
(It should also be added that the Petro aspect, Met Kafou Legba, represents destruction rather than creation and is a trickster who introduces chaos and disruption.)

Another supposition I have been thinking about is weather or not TOWTM is or is not Bill Roberts, AKA: Ink. Ink was convicted of multiple homicides (last May, suspiciously close to exactly a year before the outbreak) and was confirmed to be paranoid schizophrenic by his doctors. Multiple? How Many? Serial Killer and for how long? Over here, in the WND #55 thread, I talked about the the apparent experimentation that TOWTM is conducting at the hospital.

If Ink actually is TOWTM, I think that it's entirely possible that he didn't wait until Z-Day to start experimenting and building his army. That's what those homicides were. Failures because human biology couldn't cope with the radical things he was trying to do with them and he didn't have quite the right cocktail worked out yet. He needed "Zombie" biology and the haze for it to work.


As a parting shot for the day, I'd like to throw a few things out there.

• What do you think of the positioning of the tattoos? Do you think that there might be meaning in their location in addition to the tattoo itself? I initially thought of Chakras, but but given only seven, that didn't make a lot of sense. I hit on Chi Meridians but I haven't found a good reference for that yet.
• The Greek capitol letter Theta that's on his nose. I've been reading up on theta brainwaves to see if anything turns up... there may be something there.
• Also looking into the chemical structure of both Tetrodotoxin and Chlorpromazine. (Thorazine, the first drug developed as an anti-psychotic.)
• Curious about the nature of the faded and overlapping tattoos... are they meant to represent the experimental nature of the process or are the molecules actually far more complex than we realize?

That, and I've back burner'ed the angelic alphabets angle. All appearances seem to indicate that it's a red herring of my own making.

[Witch_Doctor]

Awesome, post. I have to run to work, but I can't wait to see what you can find out about the tetrodotoxin, i.e. puffer fish-zombie goo from Serpent and the Rainbow.

[Eviebae]

This might help slightly...

Attachment 2631

So the chicken foot looking thing at the top right is I think rune that means man. In a lot of the runic alphabets it's shown with curved arms, but, in many instances was found looking like the symbol on his ole' bald head. So, he may be the protector of his people/creations (zombies); the protector of the earth from the humans; or what would interest me most: protector of the human species because he saw something catastrophic about to happen and he wanted to mutate humanity to help us survive it (Granted the last one would make the need to kill us all and make us into tasty nom noms pointless). At the very least, like all genocidal monsters; he sees himself doing good.


Consider this though before we all fall down the symbol rabbit hole--It all doesn't seem to add up to a lot of information except in terms of concepts that were on his mind (or the mind of whoever tattooed him on the back of his head for instance).

In most zombie fiction, when someone engineers zombies it's to cleanse the earth of the destructive humans. This way we get to have our cake and eat it too. We get to vastly improve the quality of our morning commute; but we also get to be innocent and appalled by the slaughter. By mutating us; he believes he's actually allowing for our survival? That is, if they can have kids, otherwise we are meant to go the way of the dinosaur.

OOH! Here's a fun idea; This world having been created by aliens as a petri dish to create a sentient species has had several extinctions also created by them. The dinosaurs were cool, but other than learning how to fly, they didn't seem to advance to the next cognitive level so the aliens wiped the slate and started again. They saw us as too rapacious (or REALLY didn't like reality TV) and were warming up the eraser. Somehow, Ink found out about it. He thought trying to talk to people about it was futile, so he figured out the state that would best allow us to survive the reset.