hagstone inscriptions

A hagstone is any stone with a hole all the way through it. Usually formed through the slow dripping of water, they are considered good luck or protective charms in different spiritual and religious traditions. On the California coast, these stones are instead shaped by the persistent work of piddock clams who burrow their bodies into the soft mudstone and gauge it with their growth, encasing themselves in the bedrock and glowing bioluminescent all the while. The “hagstone” isn’t formed until the stone breaks and erodes; rupture is the condition of protection and precursor to magic. Referred to as “angelwings,” these clams are architects of their own kind of imperfect, broken luck. The rocks they shape are inscriptions of their knowledge and talismans for the ongoing processes of learning to make space and glow within impenetrable terrain.

Using charcoal and oil, I print the inscriptions of these stones onto fabric. The tattoos that result are an inverse of the process by which they are formed: an inscription of the trace fossil made by clams burrowing into stone now burrows into skin: bodies shaped by stones shaped by bodies.

Below is my library of these printed inscriptions and an archive of their translation into tattoos.

If you’d like to be tattooed with these, please indicate so on the booking form. You do not need to select a piece in advance of your appointment. Please note that these must be done at no smaller than 3 inches.

Optional: participants in this project can contribute a small “translation” of their inscription to the book that this project will become. A translation can be a word, letter, feeling, spell, sound. It is quite open ended, any message that you feel is encoded within your hagstone.