I feel bad that I didn’t design this tattoo to be placed in a more prominent location. Unfortunately, at the time I was designing my characters, it had not yet occurred to me that human beings are three dimensional and have sides as well as fronts and backs (okay, that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one). So when I finally placed the tattoo of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, it was divinely ascending into Theo’s left armpit.

The Eastern Orthodox icon is based on the instructional writings of St. John Climacus (7th century AD) and the visual imagery of “Jacob’s Ladder,” a dream which Jacob had in Genesis 28 about a ladder stretching from earth to heaven. I first became familiar with the image from the tattered cover of my parents’ copy of The Great Divorce, a novella by C.S. Lewis.