Dillon Forte
My tattoo artist of choice was Dillon Forte a California native who was born in Santa Monica in 1987. Forte is not only a tattoo artist but also a well known painter although most of his work recognized is his distinct styling of sacred geometry Tattoos. Forte has traveled the world in order to perfect his craft and has studied ancient tattooing practices and techniques in order to incorporate it into his own modern renditions. Today he has two shops open here in California one is located in Venice beach the other is in Oakland both go by the name of Sri Yantra Tattoo.
Most of Dillon Forte’s work implement a style of art known as Sacred geometry, which is the use of very basic geometric patterns that are found through out nature and are the building blocks of much more complex things. The belief is that these geometric shapes are sacred because they create the reality that we find ourselves in, everything that we see can be broken down to these geometric shapes. Forte implements many of these designs and shapes along with images representing nature, life, and religion.
Forte has stated that his goal is to show through geometry the underlying connections in all things found in our reality. In his own words, “From the microcosm to the macrocosm, there are mathematical relationships that underlie the fundamental structure of our universe.”. Forte isn’t the first to implement the use of sacred geometry in his tattoos but he does share the belief with many others that the mysteries of life can all be found by studying the relationships of all things, that our universe and everything in it shares a fundamental structure system.
Many of his works depicted below tend to start at a center point and flow harmoniously outward with the design becoming more and more complicated as it expands. As you can also see he incorporates images such as skulls depicting death but the message he hopes to carry isn’t that of fear but positive outlook. For one of the skull images he said his inspiration came from the quote “Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, 'Did you bring joy?' The second was, 'Did you find joy?”. Other images depict religions such as Hinduism that share the belief that many things in this universe are fundamentally connected adding to his subjective view of the art form.
