The devil's tattoo

In "Illusion turning into reality" I mention hearing the Natalie Imbruglia song "Torn" at a synchronistically opportune moment in a coffee shop on September 25. The reason I had even been paying attention to the background music was what had played just before "Torn."

The instrumental intro had started, and I recognized it as a song I knew and liked: "Dirty Paws" by Of Monsters and Men. Then the singing started, and it was something totally different. The lyrics name-dropped "pumpkin pie," which is a sync-fairy calling card these days, but mainly I was listening to the lyrics so that I could look the song up and see who had so shamelessly ripped off OMAM's instrumentals.

Then, finally, a verse of "Dirty Paws" was sung, and I realized that this was not a ripoff but a mashup. I found it online: "Home/Dirty Paws" by the Gardiner Sisters:

The other half of the mashup, a song called "Home," was credited to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, a group I'd never heard of. I looked them up and found that the lead singer's name is Alex Ebert -- a nod to the recent "Eb(b)ert sync."

The next day (yesterday), I had the Gardiner Sisters mashup in my head and realized that the non-OMAM parts of the melody were reminding me of yet another song. After a long tip-of-the-tongue moment, I pinpointed it: "Rose Tattoo" by the Dropkick Murphys.

I'm a big fan of that song and the video, and my longstanding private interpretation of it is rather improbably mystical. A Being wakes up on Earth, disoriented, and realizes he's incarnated again, his memory wiped clean. He's an old hand at this, though, and knows how to deal with that situation: take a drag of last night's cigarette that smoldered in its tray, down a little something and then be on his way. He's confident he can feel his way through this life and accomplish his mission, guided by a combination of instinct ("I was guided by a compass / I saw beauty to the north") and externalized memories in the form of signs he and others have arranged for him to encounter ("I had these memories all around me / So I wouldn't be alone"), typified by the rose tattoo itself and by other things we see in the video, such as the playing cards (Ace of Hearts front and center, I notice now) and the sign that says "If you're lucky enough to be Irish, you're lucky enough."

Yesterday, for some reason, the thought of "Rose Tattoo" triggered a vivid fantasy based on the other meaning of the word tattoo. I saw a fanciful scene from an over-literal version of "the Wars of the Roses," in which the soldiers -- each with a bobbing red or white flower for a head -- were marching to the beat of the Rose Tattoo. The music accompanying this martial scene was, rather improbably, this song from my childhood:

In my pretty garden the flowers are nodding

How do you do? they say

How do you do today?

In my pretty garden the flowers are nodding

This fantasy made me curious about the etymology of tattoo and how it came to mean two such entirely different things. Just a coincidence, it turns out. The military meaning comes from tap-to and originally indicated that it was time for taverns to shut off the taps. The skin-marking meaning is of Polynesian origin -- Wiktionary suggests as one possibility "e.g. Samoan tatau ('tattoo; to tap, to strike')." That "to tap" is an additional coincidence, given that the other etymology is "tap-to." The Etymonline entry for the military meaning of tattoo ends thus (emphasis in the original):

In English, the transferred sense of "drumbeat" is recorded from 1755. Hence, Devil's tattoo "action of idly drumming fingers in irritation or impatience" (1803).

I had never heard the expression "devil's tattoo" before. It caught my attention because in the Dropkick Murphys video that kicked off this whole tattoo investigation includes several shots of the band members drumming on the table with their fingers.

This morning I read a little in Phantasia over breakfast. One of the major plotlines in the novel is that certain of the "great devils" (Beings corresponding to the seven deadly sins), disgruntled with changes in the administration of hell, have decided to incarnate on Earth, where they struggle to find their way -- a theme obviously suggestive of my personal interpretation of "Rose Tattoo." Today I read this passage, describing the dissatisfaction in hell of the great devil Sloth [correction: actually a demon, not a great devil] leading up to his decision to incarnate:

He was restless, but he tried to focus on his task, typing up a statement of intent or something like it in the machine and then leave it at the desk of his superior, only for him to take it to some other department of hell, he wasn't even sure which one, but the clacking of sound of the typewriter is annoying and then distracting, he starts to press the keys merely for the sounds they are producing, amusing himself with the basic rhythms he can drum with his fingers, and then he has a page full of gibberish.

So here is the devil's tattoo -- "action of idly drumming fingers in irritation or impatience" -- performed by a literal devil in hell. And because it is on the keys of a typewriter that he is drumming, the action produces markings in ink, thus tying it to the other meaning of tattoo.