Tim Duncan, human tattoo
By Bryan Harvey
Tim Duncan has other tattoos, but they are not this tattoo. This tattoo is large, and not by conventional standards, which are bound by more modest human proportions. No, this tattoo traverses a meridian from his waist’s equator to the poles of his shoulders, and since he stands within a breath of seven feet tall, the ink covers a space more in proportion to Picasso’s Guernica than Chinese characters or I Love You, Mom.
On most people tattoos tend to be inkblot memorials. They age and fade, drooping and sagging, with time, but they remain dedicated and dutiful to their initial cause, even as that initial cause becomes increasingly past tense and juvenile. Perhaps Duncan realized that.
For years, he played in the NBA with a rather sinister-looking court jester bordering his right shoulder blade. The demonic clown could never have been described as cool, at least not by NBA standards. After all, it looked all too much like a tribute to ICP or some other band from the era of Korn’s Family Values Tour. In other words, Duncan’s tattoo tagged him as an anachronistic being, which is not unusual as far as tattoos go. They all gesture eventually towards the indecipherable, but with Duncan, the ink began in hieroglyph.
Towards the end of his career, however, his cruel wizard of an inkblot was no longer visible. This adolescent vision of the self always played peek-a-boo from behind his jersey, often as he crouched into that pigeon-toed stance he used to pray for his foul shots to fall. But in those last couple seasons on the court the fool became a symbol of wisdom. In place of the jester’s black and red cap was a yin and yang contortion. You see, Duncan had gone far too metta in his vision of the self to have just any yin-yang clipart tattooed over his once vicious joker, so the ancient symbol of contradictory opposites was stylized as mechanical gears carving their way through human skin.
If Duncan’s clown had once been whispering, “hey, I’ve got a killer sense of humor,” then this mechanical eclipse winked, “hey, I know everyone thinks I’m not human, and they’re right—here’s my wiring.”
And now, those yin and yang gears have multiplied, carving out a mechanical motif all up and down Tim Duncan’s back.
The most literal motive for the new tattoo is Duncan’s Black Jack passion for cars, which he naturally promotes with less enthusiasm than an HGTV voiceover. Another but more metaphorical motive is his understanding of his public persona on and off the court. Who else but an android would still wear cargo shorts?
Read More: Tim Duncan's tattoo, the Mutombo Hoax and more NBA mysteries
And yet, maybe the tattoo is something else altogether. Maybe Duncan is a Westworld host, as some have already theorized. Maybe his tattoo is the unfinished blueprints to a prison he designed. Maybe the dude is trying to solve a murder and doesn’t believe in notepads. Maybe he’s part of a secret society. Maybe he plans on boarding a whaling ship with Ishmael. Whatever the reasons for this flesh and ink mural, Tim Duncan continues to evolve, and the old interests—the Dungeons and Dragon nicknames and logos—are now the limestone foundations for a maze of new interests.
Personally, though, I think the tattoo is a blueprint for the Adamantium alloy he plans on fusing to his calcium phosphate bones—that way the Big Fundamental could play forever.