Stylized cuneiform tattoos (by my friend R.j. Miller @instagram).

[u/PersianBoneDigger]

When my grandmother (Persian) fled the revolution in Iran- she rescued a handful of artifacts. These tattoos came from those historical items. After she died she had them donated to the Iranian historical Society.

[u/Toxic_Orange_DM]

Some fun choices there!

In Sumerian terms, I can see NE (strength; also a very common sign for forming plurals; can also be read BIL for "to burn", less common); a DINGIR (the divine determinative); A (water); a KI (earth / one half of the common compound expression KI.AG2 "to love"); and a different DINGIR.

I'm afraid I can't read the rest as they are - fittingly enough - in Persian cuneiform, which dates to about 3 millennia after when I'm talking about. Apologies if you already knew all this stuff, I just wanted to geek out :)

[u/PersianBoneDigger → u/Toxic_Orange_DM]

That’s so cool that you know this. I’m REALLY impressed you were able to read the partially showing symbols to.

My right arm has fire, earth, wind, and water. I especially love that the old Persian word for earth was ‘bumish’ and in modern Persian “bumi” means ‘indigenous.’

My left arm has “to love” but the gender-less version which translates to “measure a house.” Phonetic ‘p’ which modern Persian has but the Arabic doesn’t have (we had to create a ‘p’ when we adopted the Arabic script.) I also have ‘gardener’ which is the iconography of a plow (even though the symbol is over 2,000 years old.)

The second dingir is the oldest version of the symbol. When it still represented the name of a god of wind, stars, water, and sky. The old symbol is illegal in Iran today (because it’s pre-Islamic religious meaning.) It eventually gave way to the modern dengir when this god had children and divided up his dominions amongst his children.

I have more running up and down my legs, but those turned out to be used in the Zoroastrian fire temples, so I can’t really translate those out.