Like a hot zit branding your nostril with pain and futility, the search for meaning in this instance defies the reach of those clumsy, grubbing fingers of the average bloke.

Not that I’ve stopped trying to decode the thing. Here’s some early examples:

Opposites burn? Too obvious, and meaningless.

Ancient eastern philosophers were pyromaniacs? Too literal, and hard to document.

The balance of opposing universal energies sizzle when they’re hot? Fun, thoroughly American, but dumb as hell.

At the wizened age of 18, I ducked into the dark tattoo parlor on Broadway, a few twenties stuffed into my stone-washed jeans, a pack of Camels in my flannel shirt pocket, and my still-smoking yellow Ford Pinto parked crookedly against the low curb.

It was time. Growing up, 18 was always the magic number. Can I get an earring? Can I get grow my hair out? Can I leave town with some friends? Can I get a tattoo?

The answer was always, “When you’re 18 you can do what you want. Until then, stuff it.”

So, I stuffed it deep under my thin skin and when the age of my majority arrived, I went on a binge of self-mutilation and thus found myself sitting in a dank studio by the highway, pouring over volume after volume of suggested tattoo ideas, trying to find the one that best represented who I was, and what I wanted to become. Though there was a long list of expectations and qualifications, it never dawned on me to create my own design or, in the age of libraries, do any meaningful research.

Fate would intervene, I told myself, and the perfect tattoo would be found on a business card sized picture in an album stained with beer and coffee on the counter of a random mediocre tattoo parlor.

It had to be badass. It should tell the world how freakishly smart I am, that I’m an artist, I’m sensitive, and that I love rock music.

It should attract women, and scare other men — excepting those who I wanted desperately (but always failed) to impress.

It needed to compensate for the fact that I quit playing high school football after one year, and never got off the bench.

It should also be large enough to cover for my congenital lack of physique, and be in a place where I could show it off without having to take off my shirt and expose these man boobs.

I took my time, and chose carefully.

There were anchors, hearts, and arrows; calligraphy of every sort, declaring any kind of message you could think up; naked ladies, naked dudes, pictures of old girlfriends, and pictures of old naked girlfriends.

Football helmets, four-leaf clovers, confederate flags, and bar codes if you wanted to be ironic. There were various felines in sundry poses, all trying to suggest the impression that the animal was somehow leaping out of someone’s bony shoulder, or from their dangling wing of back fat.

Muscle cars, foot prints, even full-on portraits of friends and family. Fishing rods and speedboats; cartoon characters and Bible quotes; cultural flotsam of every kind, outlining every sort of interest and passion imaginable.

My limited budget constrained my choices significantly, but I finally managed to find an image that struck me as both poetic and philosophical, smart and worldly. It reflected something about me, something that might tickle a sort of fascination within future friends and companions, yet I hadn’t the faintest clue what in the hell it meant.

That can come later, I told myself.

Yin yang on fire. Roughly two inches tall on the thick meat of my upper right shoulder, it burns there still. Red, orange, black and white — if you squint your eyes, it looks like Bobo the Clown in a chain gang, paying off his considerable debt to society.

Meanwhile, the lifelong journey to figure out its complex figurative and psychological meaning continues to this day.

Whatever you do, don’t ask me about it. I had a doctor once who, on the verge of surgery, noticed it just as I slipped under. Though I don’t recall the conversation, he reported to me afterward that after several seconds, long after he thought I was too sedated to answer, I turned his way and set my eyelids fluttering wildly: It’s cosmic, man.

After hearing the anecdote, I’ve imagined my tattoo as a legend of the operating room, a story told over surgeries of every type in Humboldt County and elsewhere, one likely responsible for malpractice suits up and down the state as doctors and nurses snare themselves on the cryptic riddle of a cosmic yin yang in flames.

I’ve gotten other tattoos since, but pulled back on the mystique and chose either designs that I liked but meant nothing, or symbols that clearly spelled out their intent from the start. Call me pedestrian, but I’ve settled down in my old age.

Yet for this one, this first foray into the mysterious and adult realm of bad ink, I’m still puzzling all these years later to piece together an explanation that makes it seem appropriate and clever, while camouflaging all my character defects and personality flaws.

Down with opposites, let’s all agree?

Danger, danger: Everything looks worse in black and white?

Better to burn out than pick sides?

Matter and anti-matter can make a really big, if mostly theoretical, boom in space?

Or, the leading contender: If you want to maintain a slow burn to happiness, find a balance and make it stick?

Yeah, so far I like that last one.

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James Faulk is a writer living in Eureka. He can be reached at faulk.james@yahoo.com.