Jeff Carreira: Hello Mark, and thank you for speaking with us. As we thought about this issue on spirituality and art, we thought your work was a perfect fit, and including tattoo art intrigued us. I saw on your website that you talk about learning through an apprenticeship. The first stage of your journey started in the old-school tattoo scene, including small, dark shops and biker gangs. Can you tell us what that part of your journey was like?

Mark Nara: At that time bikers had a bit of a stronghold on the tattoo industry. They either owned the shops or were exploiting the people that owned the shops by demanding commissions on what they sold. I saw some of that, and sometimes shops that didn’t play along would get blown up. After an incident at the Sydney airport between some gangs and the government, the industry began normalizing tattoo licensing. That was the start of moving the gangs out, and it opened the gates for more artists to enter the industry. That changed things, but before that it was pretty gnarly, pretty rough. There was some artistic work happening, but not as much as today.

Jeff Carreira: On your website you describe how that was the early stage of your apprenticeship, but then you went to art school, honed your artistic skills, and then had a big turnaround with a Navajo holy man. You said that’s when you met the creator.

Mark Nara: I would say that it was more of an introduction to that connection.

Jeff Carreira: Tell me about that.

Mark Nara: I started to question tattooing, as I simultaneously started questioning life. It was a waking up moment, or really a barrage of them. I knew that there was more to life and I started asking, what am I doing? It was a big introspection, and naturally tattooing got pulled into that stream of inquiry. I started noticing how dark that tattoo space was. And it got very abrasive because I was trying to be more intentional and give more awareness to what I was doing in a space that was fast-paced, very egocentric, and financially driven.

At that time I went traveling. I was in Mexico when I met an intentional artist who was tattooing and doing everything under ceremony in a jungle in Mexico. I worked with her for a while. While I was there I had my first sweat lodge – I thought I was going to die. I hadn’t realized what I was in for. When I got back to Australia, an acquaintance of mine told me about a sweat lodge that I should go to. I was really surprised because prior to the trip in Mexico, sweat lodges weren’t on my radar at all. We went and I met a holy man called Wind. He was doing sweat lodges and vision quests and all sorts of things within his system to help young men from my area, people that were dealing with addiction, and other difficult issues. It was pretty raw and real. He was working with people who were dealing with all kinds of things.

I wasn't super trusting initially, because it seemed like an Australian version of sweat lodge. Or as he later told me, a version that catered to Australians, as opposed to indigenous peoples, like the one I experienced in Mexico. It was a little gentler, in a bigger space. But that’s when II started to get confused around tattooing, because I had always pictured it as art. Even in the biker studios I always wanted to do really beautiful artwork. Wind had tattoos that didn't make sense to me. They were simple black patterns. I didn’t know why you would want those on your body when you could create something so much more detailed. You could do so much more with that canvas. That was the artist thinking. He had all of these random markings on his arm, like a scoreboard.

When I engaged with him about his tattoos, he explained that they were part of what we would call a therapeutic process, a part of the medicine that he worked with. And that he was actually carrying things that he had removed from people. It was almost like the penance of a shaman. I understand a bit more now than I did then, but at that point It was extremely perplexing. There was a huge gap in my understanding of a process that I had already been involved with for seven years. I hadn't come into contact with this whole other way of comprehending the process of marking the skin. To me, it was still just art. That moment was very disruptive, in a good way.

About a year later I went traveling in Tasmania, and 12 months later I found myself back on the mainland. I reached out to do a private sweat Lodge with Wind, and that's when it really kicked off. He needed someone to drive him up the coast to a gathering, so I spent about two weeks on the road with him. And at the end of that trip I asked him if I could apprentice with him. Because during those two weeks I saw so many things that I couldn't comprehend. I knew I needed more time to understand a different way of working with people.

Jeff Carreira: It sounds like those two weeks were an initiation for you. That's the language I would use. You were being initiated into a possibility. DId it all happen during the car ride?

Mark Nara: It was maybe a few days in the car, but then we arrived at a cultural center with mixed ceremonial sites from mixed indigenous traditions. Wind had a site where he was offering lodges morning and night.

Jeff Carreira: From your perspective now, what would you say you got from that experience? What were you infused with?

Mark Nara: On that particular trip, there was a point when we were in a lodge. It was pitch black. I wasn't even meant to be in it, actually, I was meant to be outside. But it was the last round and Wind told me to come and sit inside. I was sitting next to him and he said, “you're a Record Keeper.” That was the language he used, Record Keeper. And it was another moment similar to seeing the tattoos on his arm for the first time. I didn't fully grasp it. It's taken a long time to really unpack everything that happened, and to come to a deeper understanding of the mechanism and function of tattooing as something that records information, opposed to being only a piece of art. So one of the main reframes I use with people now is that your tattoos aren't art, they’re information. And it's paradoxical because of course it's art. But it's more than that. And if you don’t know that, then you miss just how much is being locked into you at that point in time. Like with those marks on his arm, tattoos carry information.

That was a crucial moment, in terms of what I'm doing now. On a bigger scale, during those two weeks I received an imprint of the place that tattooing holds as part of a bigger ecology. When you come from the contemporary modern tattoo world, you find that tattooing is its own culture. Tattooing is the source of the culture – it’s just tattooing. In the many cultures that I have been exposed to since that trip, I see how tattooing is a small piece within the nest of a larger culture. And that is what gives tattooing its significance. It's significant because it weaves in with everything else. It's not an isolated thing. It rests in a larger story within the community. What allows tattooing to be initiatory is the mutual understanding and collective witnessing of the wider culture.

Jeff Carreira: You just described how you weren't supposed to be in the sweat lodge, but Wind called you in and then said to you, you are a Record Keeper. When you said that, I got an intense energetic hit of chills. When you told the story I could feel there was a lot going on in that moment. I think he was transmitting something to you.

Mark Nara: Honestly, before that moment I didn't understand the oral transmission thing. I had people tell me about how a lot of stuff had to be passed on orally within these different cultures. I imagined they did that to avoid interpretation. But at that moment, I went from carrying the rocks as the fire keeper, to sitting in the lodge. And when he said that, it almost flattened me. It was one of those moments that I know was really important, and I was struggling to compute it. He put something in me that I've been chewing on for a long time.

Jeff Carreira: That's amazing. Those are big moments in one's life. I watched a few of your videos, and in one of them you said that tattoos are the blueprints of the soul. I found that to be a wonderful definition of a tattoo. Could you say a little more about what you mean by that?

Mark Nara: Tattoos are stories of our journey. Every tattoo, all the tattoos you accumulate, tell the story of your journey through your life. So we have the narrative, and we also have the navigation, but that's more metaphysical. My understanding is that the soul is linked to the human as well as the spirit. It connects to the spirit and to the essence, but it must also link to the genealogy, the river or root system of our genetic imprinting. The tattoo ends up being like a blueprint, or a technical diagram. The modern tattoo practice, globally, still has an artwork-based focus. It's missing some components. But if you look at how tattooing has been used prior to the past 200 years or so, it all had to do with genealogy. You might even say mythology, creation stories about who your people are, your place within those people, and your people's place within the larger world. Tattoos were a map and a manuscript to communicate that. They put all those things together for the individual. The tattoo depicts the framework that they exist within, and links them to the past and to things beyond them. That's the soul blueprint idea.

Jeff Carreira: In one of your other videos you said that all tattoos are spiritual. Even those that you might later regret are still spiritual. It doesn't matter how unconscious you were when you got it, a spiritual element is included in every tattoo.

Mark Nara: They're all recording something. That's the record keeping aspect. And then there's the navigational aspect. Many cultures talk about tattoos bearing weight on your movement forward. It moves you a degree to the left or to the right. Even if you are completely unconscious because you've been out drinking all night or you were influenced by a mob of mates, it's still going to have an influence. Through working with people over the past five years, I’ve found that some of the tattoos done unconsciously still hold so much value for the person moving forward, because it reveals so much about a little window of time. A person can look at that tattoo and be amazed at who they were and what they were doing at that time. Those tattoos are like alluvial gold in a river bed that naturally comes to the surface. You don't even have to mine for them. And they are extremely valuable if you choose to look at them that way. Not everyone will because it can be quite uncomfortable, but they all bear some weight on your movement forward.

Jeff Carreira: You're saying that tattoos have two functions. They're blueprints of the soul that record deeper aspects of yourself. And they serve a navigational function by exerting a degree of influence over how your life unfolds from that point forward. I can see how tattoos could become part of someone's spiritual life. You could get a tattoo in order to get a deeper glimpse into your soul, or to exert some influence in a positive direction over your future. When you give tattoos to people, are you trying to help them understand their spiritual potential?

Mark Nara: When I work with people who already have a number of tattoos, I take them through a mapping process. We need to understand the record that's already there. Understanding what's already there is the blueprint part. It's like your internal structures are already being represented on your external vehicle, and being perceived by the external world. Often there are incongruencies, and it might reveal some things that don’t actually work. It is as if there are errors in your drawing, or conflicting pages in a story. There might even be a page that someone else wrote – it’s not even part of your story.

Once you have all of the existing information straight, then you can start to orient yourself in terms of whether there's anything that needs to be worked on to help you move forward. That’s the navigational aspect. If a person comes to me with no tattoos, then I try to open up their perspective, which usually means helping them think beyond the art of the tattoo and showing them the function behind the process. I try to help them understand that a tattoo has a very real, tangible impact that changes you physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. There will be a deep adjustment that takes place as a result of this moment.

Jeff Carreira: What results have you seen with your clients that inspire you to continue your work?

Mark Nara: There's just so much. It's changing people's lives. I see how the process removes the artificial layers of people’s identity. If I was to distill it to its essence, people come in and because of the way they tend to think about tattoos, they are basically wanting to add new layers of identity. They want their tattoos to say something good about themselves, sometimes to hide something else they don’t like. The process I do with people undoes that. It allows them to remove layers of false identity and come into closer contact with who they actually are.