Know that the tattoos are all significant. They're all extremely

“Know that the tattoos are all significant. They're all extremely insignificant. I can't break each one down, but it's 20 years. The first one was 21 years of age from a football teammate.” — Omari Hardwick

Thus speaks Omari Hardwick, actor and poet, a man who has lived with both discipline and depth. In his words lies a paradox worthy of the sages: that the markings of our past are both significant and insignificant, both sacred and ordinary. The tattoos he bears are not merely ink upon skin—they are time itself made visible, the record of two decades of living, loving, losing, and becoming. Yet, as he admits, they are also trivial—small gestures in the face of life’s vastness. For what is twenty years, or a symbol etched in flesh, compared to the eternity of the soul?

To the ancients, the body was a scroll upon which the story of the spirit was written. Warriors bore scars as testaments of courage, priests inscribed sigils to bind their faith, and lovers carved names as vows against forgetting. Each mark carried meaning, yet no mark could contain the whole of a life. So too does Hardwick speak from that dual wisdom: his tattoos are “significant,” because they capture memory; and “insignificant,” because no symbol can capture the full weight of living. The lesson is this—life’s meaning resides not in the marks we make, but in the journey that makes us mark ourselves at all.

His first tattoo, born of camaraderie with a football teammate, tells of youth—the age of twenty-one, when strength pulses and identity begins to carve itself out of fire. It was not a celebrity’s ornament, but a friend’s offering, a moment of shared defiance and belonging. In that gesture lies the root of all remembrance: the human need to anchor the fleeting. What began as one mark became many, until the body itself became an archive of a man’s evolution. Each tattoo, though small, carried a chapter of his transformation—from athlete to artist, from man of muscle to man of mind.

Consider, too, the story of Captain Cook’s sailors, who returned from the islands of the Pacific with their bodies adorned by native tattooists. Those marks, strange to the eyes of Europe, became signs of experience, proof that they had journeyed beyond known waters. Yet, over time, the sailors themselves passed away, and their tattoos faded into dust. What remained was not the ink, but the legacy of the voyages themselves. The symbols had meaning only because of the lives behind them. So it is with Hardwick: his marks are vessels, carrying the memory of movement through time—but the true journey is inward, invisible, eternal.

The wisdom here is not about tattoos, but about identity. We all etch our stories upon something—skin, memory, canvas, word. We cling to objects, songs, rituals that remind us we have lived. But the enlightened see that meaning is both everywhere and nowhere. To say something is significant is to honor it; to say it is insignificant is to free oneself from its weight. Only by holding both truths can we live without being bound to our past, yet never forgetting it.

Omari’s paradox reveals a profound peace: to honor every moment, but not worship it. To see beauty in the ink of our scars, yet not mistake the scars for the soul. The significant gives us roots; the insignificant gives us wings. And the wise, like Hardwick, dwell in the tension between the two—grateful for each mark, yet unchained by it.

Practical counsel for the seeker:

• Remember your journey, but do not become trapped in your symbols. Let them remind, not define.

• Create with intention, yet release attachment to what you create; art and life are rivers, not monuments.

• Honor your past, even its mistakes—they are the ink from which your wisdom is written.

• And above all, live fully, so that when you look upon your own “tattoos,” whether on skin or in memory, you may smile and say: They mean everything—and nothing—for I have lived them all.

Thus, the paradox stands like an ancient riddle: that what marks us most deeply cannot be seen, and what is seen most vividly will one day fade. But in the living of it—in the act of becoming—lies the eternal art. For as Omari Hardwick teaches through quiet wisdom: every mark is sacred, and every mark is dust—and in that truth, we are free.