Many, many years ago, I designed a tattoo based on a Taíno symbol known as the Sol de Jayuya. I found classic petroglyph-style drawings of it and thought, "I'm going to redraw this in my own way." So I did. I put my own spin on it, cleaned it up, and turned it into a vector. I actually drew it in FreeHand, an old vector program I used alongside Illustrator, almost 20 years ago.
I took the design to a local tattoo shop and got my first tattoo. Underneath it were two little Taíno baby symbols that I also drew, representing my two children at the time: a newborn and a toddler. Later, after my third child was born, I added a third baby to the tattoo, like one does.
I posted the design on a blog I was keeping back then, one of those very mid-2000s internet blogs, and I also uploaded it to my then-very-cool DeviantArt page. I didn't think much of it. At the time, I certainly wasn't thinking about how casually artwork could spread across the internet.
A while later, I started getting messages on Facebook from random people. A few Puerto Rican guys had found the design and asked if they could use it for their own tattoos. Every one of them was respectful enough to ask, and I told them all yes. One guy even sent me a picture after he got it tattooed, and we ended up becoming Facebook friends. I always thought that was pretty cool.
What I didn't realize was just how much farther the image had traveled.
Recently, I started running reverse image searches with TinEye, and the results were honestly fascinating. The design had been copied all over the place. Tattoo websites, most of which are now long gone. A music artist apparently used it as part of a logo. Even more surprising, some Latino studies-related branding at the University of Connecticut appears to have started with my exact vector design. They changed the colors and replaced the center, but the outer sun rays are unmistakably mine, right down to the little imperfections. It's clearly derived from the file I drew all those years ago.
Now I'm curious: How many people have this tattoo?
How many asked? Like 4 people. But, how many didn't?
How many stumbled across it while searching for Taíno tattoo ideas and simply assumed it was an authentic historical symbol or public-domain artwork?
I'm not asking because I'm upset. Quite the opposite. I'm not trying to track anyone down, threaten anybody, or claim ownership over something that's been floating around the internet for two decades. That's not the point.
The funny part is that nearly every copy I found still has my old DeviantArt watermark on it. Apparently people didn't even bother removing it. They just passed around the same JPEG for years.
But thats all I have of it too, apart from, oh I dunno, the ink embedded in my skin of it. (The original vector file is long gone.)
As far as I'm concerned, the image has effectively become public domain through sheer internet entropy. I'm certainly not trying to put that genie back in the bottle.
I just think it's funny.
I drew a tattoo for myself like almost 20 years ago, put it on a blog without thinking twice about it, and somehow it quietly propagated across the internet. Somewhere out there, there are probably people wearing my interpretation of the Sol de Jayuya who have no idea where it came from.
And yes, if you want this tattoo'd on you, go for it. You have my blessing, or something. haha
The internet is weird. Sometimes, years later, it reminds you just how odd indeed it can be.