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Jahan Yousaf has at least 10 known tattoos:
In July 2016, Jahan Yousaf and her sister Yasmine got matching neck tattoo which are half of a yin-yang symbol in a paisley style. Artist Bang Bang told Rolling Stone “One of them is gonna get a positive image. The other’s gonna get the negative. So they kinda match and go together. When they look at each other, you’ll see both sides.” The yin-yang represents the duality of opposites.
Jahan Yousaf has a tattoo of roses and thorns that stretches around both sides of her neck like a collar.
Jahan Yousaf has a tattoo on her left forearm which says “Love All, Hate None, Trust Few.” It is an adaption of the line “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none” from William Shakespeare’s play All’s Well that Ends Well.
Jahan Yousaf’s “Krewlife” tattoo is a matching tattoo that she shares with her sister and fellow Krewella member Yasmine Yousaf and two members of Krewella’s crew. All of them got the tattoos together in October 2013. She tells Digital Tour Bus: “On our days off on tour we love to visit tattoo parlors. We were in Urbana, Illionois and all three of us decided to get tattoos with our director Miles Evert and our tour manager David Carlson.”
Jahan Yousaf has an intricate tattoo on her upper right arm. The design includes gears, and eye, and a crescent moon and star which are a symbol of Islam. Jahan grew in an Islamic household and went to Islamic school as a child. Her father is Muslim and was born in Pakistan, while her mother is a first-generation American of German and Lithuanian descent who converted to Islam when they got married.
Jahan Yousaf added a dotwork mandala design on her right forearm behind her varja brush tattoo.
Jahan Yousaf has the phrase “Life is a Dance Floor” tattooed on the inside of her right forearm. They are fitting words for an EDM musician.
On the outside of Jahan Yousaf’s right forearm is the Vajra Brush, a work of art by Alex Grey. The piece symbolizes the spiritual nature of art. At the center of the drawing is a combination of a paintbrush and the eastern spiritual symbol Vajra. Two winged snakes wrap around it, similar to the Caduceus symbol. Though it is often used as a symbol of medicine, the Caduceus represents occupations associated with the Greek god Hermes.
The artist explains a means that the meaning of the vajra paintbrush is “to awaken people to their own essence through the light of higher vision. The entire history of art is an expression of universal creativity that invisibly surrounds and supports every creative act. The vajra is a spiritual device, a thunderbolt scepter owned by the Hindu god Indra and adopted by the Buddhist sages as a symbol of the diamond-like clarity and brilliance of the mind’s true nature.”
Jahan Yousaf tattooed the words “One More Night” on her left shoulder and then later added shading and swirls connecting it to her neck tattoo. Eventually she added roses all the way around her neck which fill in the space between the tattoos on her neck and back and make it more cohesive. She has said that she can no longer count how many tattoos she has because they are all like one.
Jahan Yousaf’s first tattoo was “6-8-10” on the left side of her neck. It represents June 8th, 2010, the day that she and her Krewella bandmates put their lives on hold to pursue their music career full-time. In a blog post, she explains:
6/08/10 is the day I decided to drop out of college and quit my side-hustle job along with my sister Yasmine, our former band-member Kris, and our manager Nathan Lim who found us on Myspace. Letting go of the security of my college education as well as my source of income was terrifying, but in the back of my mind I knew that Krewella would never see the light of day if we didn’t nurture the project with daily practice, discipline, and work ethic. If we didn’t make the decision as a group to abandon all other pursuits to commit ourselves to music, I think I would have spent my life always wondering what Krewella could have been. I think I would have been tortured with resentment for not taking a risk. When we got the date tattoo’d on our necks, it was symbolic of our promise to Krewella, to never give up, and in a sense trapped us from ever getting jobs that required us to cover the ink in such an exposed place.
Her sister Yamsine, who has the same tattoo in a different font, bought her the tattoo for her 22nd birthday. Since then, she has surrounded this tattoo with other inkings, but she hasn’t covered it.
