Uta's Tattoos: The sun
First of all, I’m sorry I haven’t written anything in a while. I’ve been pretty busy with other things. (シ_ _)シ But here I am again, with a post about Uta’s most straightforward tattoo: The one on his chest. This must symbolize the sunflower/sun. The symbolic meaning of these two are closely related to each other, so I’ll just put it here as one. It’s also the same image (not exactly the same, but the same idea) that is being used as the logo of his shop, Hysy.
(The images of the tattoo’s I use as reference are from here, posted by nimawalker, so go check those out!)
The first association that I think fits Uta very well is that it’s the symbol of mind or intellect. This has come back in his other tattoos as well. He’s a smart man. It takes a good mind to hide your identity and survive, when you’re part of a heavily hunted, influential group.
It’s also associated with eyes. Again, eyes were present in his other tattoos, and they’re probably referring to him being able to gather all kinds of information. He has eyes everywhere. That is mostly to gather information. This kinda connects to another meaning, which is power. As Itori kindly states, information is power. (chapter 34)
Despite all the lying he’s doing, the sunflower also means loyalty. This is interesting. We may not know who Uta’s loyal to, but we know he must be very loyal to that person or organization. He lies to a lot of people, but apparently not everyone. The question of course, is, who is he loyal to? Unfortunately, that’s not so easy to answer. If I had a solid idea, I would’ve told you, trust me. My mind goes out to Yomo immediately, them being good friends and all, but I really have nothing to back that up, other than their friendship over the years.
For the last meaning of the sunflower, no explanation is needed. It’s false appearance. This a meaning that belongs only to the sunflower. This flower looks a lot like the sun, yet (obviously) it isn’t. This gives it the meaning of false appearance. And Uta is the embodiment of this.
The Sun tarot card
If we know one thing for sure, it’s that Sui Ishida loves his tarot cards. I don’t know if this tattoo is actually supposed to reference the ‘Sun’ tarot card, but I’m going to look into it anyway.
The upright meaning of this card is generally very happy. It means succes, fun, positivity. Well, we all know that Uta likes to have fun, right? (chapter 143)
In all seriousness, I think this meaning fits Uta pretty well. He’s quite positive and he sees the fun in everything he does. For example, we know that during the infiltration in Aogiri’s hideout, he wasn’t taking things seriously, which means he probably just saw it as something fun. (chapter 74)
The reversed meaning is of course the opposite of this. It means that the person finds it difficult to be positive, because of a certain hurdle. It also point to a lack of succes in the person’s life. However, it’s alway just temporary, the obstacles that cause these things can be removed. I’m not really sure how that fits Uta, though.
That’s it! Is there anything I missed or something I did wrong? Please let me know!
If you want to read my other posts about Uta’s tatoos, here they are:
The Deceiving Fox
Fire & Flower
The Jester
