I first looked into getting a tattoo around 1978 while in the US Navy but the timing was always off. It really boiled down to finding the right design, the right artist, and of course, having the money to do it! I left the Navy in 1986 and forgot about tattoos for a while. Fast forward 20 years... Following 9/11 I returned to active duty in late 2001. By 2006 I was working out of Bahrain leading embarked security teams assigned to protect civilian-operated ships that had been contracted to deliver supplies and equipment to the Middle East. Depending on where the ship was coming from and where it was going, we would jump on and off either in Fujairah, UAE, or in Crete.
We spent a fair amount of time in Crete. There were members of my team who wanted to get tattoo work done and that was how we met George Tsiotsios, the owner of Medusa Tattoo Studio. After seeing the work he was doing on other members of my team I decided now was the time. We sat down and came up with a design and the result is pictured below.
This photo was taken 6 years after the tattoo was done, in 2012, while working in Afghanistan after retiring from the Navy.
Having been a lifelong martial artist, the dragon appealed to me and it was where my focus had always been. When George and I sat down to design the tattoo we incorporated the Japanese kanji for "Kyokushin", which translates as "Ultimate Truth". This kanji is embroidered on the left breast of our dogi (training uniform).
A recent photo of me that shows the kanji as worn on our uniforms.
I'd always had it in my mind I was going to "complete" the tattoo at some point, but life seemed to keep getting in the way. George and I had discussed color in the original design, but he suggested waiting and thinking more about it. Color could always be added later he said.
By 2021, when I moved back to Texas, I'd spent a pretty big chunk of the previous two decades outside the United States. I spent the period from 2004 to 2014 almost completely abroad. I retired at the beginning of 2012 and was back in Afghanistan working less than two months later. After working two years in Afghanistan I had come home in 2014, thinking it would be for good, and having bought a home and property in West Texas near Abilene. After a year and a half, I was bored and decided to sell my place. In October 2015 I left for the Philippines and spent most of the next two years there, enjoying retirement and doing a lot of scuba diving. In March 2018 I moved to Guam and opened a business teaching scuba diving. The pandemic essentially put me out of business in 2020 and by 2021 I'd had enough and decided to move home again.
I decided it was a good time to get more work done. I checked out the local tattoo artists and chose one whose work I liked. I won't say much about the artist I found. Hindsight is 20/20 and perhaps I should have listened to my gut after the first session, but not only did he charge me much more than what I'd been quoted, but in the last session he managed to obliterate some of the detail in my original tattoo! At that point, I stopped and never returned to that shop. I actually started researching tattoo removal! Yes, it was that bad! I will share a couple of photos from that session though.
After researching everything I decided tattoo removal wasn't the way to go and started looking for someone who might be able to fix it. Earlier this year I discovered Scott Dowdy at Arsenal Tattoo and Design near downtown Bryan. He didn't make any promises but thought he could at least improve it some. After the first session, it was noticeably much better! It took another session to fix the other artists' mistakes and finish what had been started, but I was extremely happy!
Progress as of March 2023
After spending 4 months in the Philippines I was back in the United States in July. Following a trip to New York for our annual karate camp, I was back at Arsenal on July 26th to start finishing up.
Normally Scott likes to put about 3 weeks in between appointments, but I had been invited to judge at a karate tournament in Las Vegas. The tournament was on Saturday, August 19th in Las Vegas. I decided to put off the next session until after I got back. On August 22nd I was back at Arsenal for another session.
The kanji reads "Osu no seishin" which translates as "Spirit of Perseverance".
On September 5th I was back for my final session and I'm quite happy with the result which I share below!
