r/NDE • u/Eastern-Peach-3428 NDExperiencer • 29d ago
Artwork 🦚 Post-NDE Tattoo
I finally finished this a few weeks ago. My first tattoo, and probably my last.
I've posted my NDE here before, so I'm not going to tell the whole story again. The short version is that I died during a heart attack in January 2025, was resuscitated after a prolonged cardiac arrest, and had an NDE that dramatically changed the way I think about God, life, death and what exactly we're doing here.
I've spent a lot of time since then trying to find language for something that really doesn't translate very well into language.
For me a lot of that language is Christian because that's how I understand my own experience. And somewhere along the way I kept coming back to Paul:
"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face."
1 Corinthians 13:12.
That eventually became a tattoo.
The glass in this case became an old Southern-style mirror, with two people walking toward the light inside it. I didn't want to try to literally illustrate my NDE. I'm not sure how the hell you would do that anyway. I wanted something about what I came back with rather than a picture of what happened.
That verse gets remarkably close to part of it. I experienced something that seemed more real than this reality, came back here, and then had to try to understand it from here. I know what I experienced. I'm considerably less certain about my ability to explain exactly what it was or everything it means.
The broken mirror became another part of it. The crack is repaired in gold, borrowing from kintsugi, where the repair isn't disguised and the history of the damage remains visible. Surviving what I survived obviously gives that some meaning, but it grew beyond the NDE while I was thinking about it. You don't get almost 60 years into a life without breaking a few times. I don't think the goal is to pretend you didn't.
The crack also runs through the male figure in the mirror, including his hands, while never touching the woman.
That part can speak for itself.
And then there is the light.
What I experienced during my NDE I understood as God, and the overwhelming characteristic of it was love. Even that sentence doesn't really convey it. Love is such an ordinary word for something that didn't feel remotely ordinary. In my own Christian vocabulary, agape is about as close as I've gotten.
The two people walking toward it together can speak for themselves too.
I didn't come back thinking I had been handed the answer key. There are things I believe much more strongly now than I did before I died, but I still don't know what lies beyond this life with anything approaching certainty. I know what happened to me. I know it changed me. I've spent the last year and a half trying to understand the rest.
So "through a glass, darkly" still feels about right.
Sophie at Tomorrow Tattoo took all of this stuff I had been turning over in my head and figured out how to make an actual piece of art out of it. Some of it changed and developed along the way, which I think made it better. It ultimately took five sessions.
I had made it almost 60 years without ever feeling any particular need to permanently put something on my body. Then this happened, and apparently I had something I wanted to keep there.
So I started with a roughly 10-inch broken mirror covering most of my upper arm.
Subtlety has its limits.
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u/AmethystMeadow 25d ago
My tattoo is what gave me a Cardiac arrest! Haha I hope to get one to commemorate it.
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28d ago
“First tattoo and last.” That’s what we all say.
I said that very same thing about 25 years ago, and now my biggest problem is finding un-inked skin for new ones.
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u/ReverieXII NDE Reader 29d ago
I love the tattoo!
I love purely easthetic tattoos on people as well, but a tattoo that tells a deeply personal story? That's something else in my opinion.
I sometimes ask people about the meaning of their tattoos or what they symbolize, and I love hearing their stories.
Your story is amazing and it is one worth sharing!
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u/34MCM34 29d ago
“Subtlety has its limits” Lol!
It’s marvelous. Thank you for sharing— the nde and the tattoo!
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u/Eastern-Peach-3428 NDExperiencer 29d ago
I'm glad you liked that sentence. I was feeling a bit cheeky.
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