I sort of call tattoos earth armor, or cosmic armor or — I don’t know, tattooing is — to me it seemed like a suit of armor when you’re tattooed all over, and maybe it’s like — and the stomach to me — I had this design in fact stuck in my head with the stomach of — and it was like a belly piece, that you would have in a suit of armor, and Bert’s style sort of leaned into that, because when he did shoulder pieces, he would do — he’d finish off a — he’d do a neck band. It wasn’t flowers that just sort of wound up into nowhere coming up to your neck. He would do a precise neck band on you. So, the stomach piece, I thought — I designed it sort of like a coat of arms, and it was symmetrical.

Then I had researched the subject that Tuttles do have two coats of arms actually from England, from back in medieval days, but I designed my own, and it was in a humorous sense — and I liked the word ‘Chicken today, feathers tomorrow.’ It’s an exciting statement. That means live today, eat chicken today, live it up, and eat feathers tomorrow. You can’t apply to yourself with chicken the next day. So, I run around, and I finally had to go to a Catholic university there in the Los Angeles area, near Long Beach, and I finally got a hold of the Latin teacher, and he wrote out ‘Chicken today, feathers tomorrow’, which is “Gallina hodie, plumae cras”. ((Eclectic Kind Of Place, Shoulders Of Giants)) I have sort of modified that thing, because that’s sort of a destructive saying in a way. It’s like just — it’s live today, to hell with tomorrow. ((Naive Belief)) And that’s sort of a bad attitude, because you got to be like — squirrels are smart enough to put some nuts away for the winter. So, sort of my motto today is that success is a trip, not the destination; the same thing, but isn’t as destructive.