Description
Derek’s driving obsession is simple but consuming: to reclaim the life—and the body—he once knew.
A celebrated plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, Derek finds his identity unraveling as mysterious tattoos begin appearing on his skin, spreading without explanation and redefining him in the eyes of the world. Branded by markings he does not understand, Derek fears he is becoming someone else entirely. As the tattoos advance, so does his desperation. Science offers no answers. His marriage strains under the weight of his emotional instability, and his wife, Kendal, watches the man she loves slip further away. Facing the loss of his career, his marriage, and his sense of self, Derek does the one thing he has avoided his entire life—he cries out to God. The stakes are deeply personal rather than apocalyptic. Derek’s struggle mirrors a universal human conflict: how to reclaim identity after trauma, and how to move forward when the foundations of life are suddenly stripped away.
The 21 Tattoos series explores what happens when transformation—uninvited and unexplained—forces people to rebuild themselves from the inside out. Both Derek and Kendal carry wounds from childhood that continue to shape their responses to pain. Derek’s early losses—his father’s death, a brutal beating, and the loss of his grandmother—hardened him into emotional detachment. Kendal, raised by an unstable, addicted mother, learned the opposite response: overattachment, empathy, and self-sacrifice. Together, their unresolved trauma creates a fragile balance that threatens to collapse under pressure. Believing a shaman woman has cursed him, Derek follows her trail into the Amazon jungle, convinced that reversing the curse will restore his former life.
Kendal, a nurse and survivor of abuse, sees Derek’s growing instability as the source of her own resurfacing fears. While Derek searches for a cure, Kendal searches for peace—each desperate to regain control of their fractured world. When the shaman vanishes, Derek pursues her granddaughter, unaware that the old woman’s true motive was never revenge but the rescue of her kidnapped grandchild. What begins as a hunt for answers becomes a dual journey—physical and spiritual—through the unforgiving jungle and the uncharted depths of Derek’s own soul. Nature itself becomes Derek’s primary antagonist: breathtaking, merciless, and indifferent. The jungle breaks his body but awakens his spirit. There is no scientific explanation for the tattoos—only an unsettling sense that something divine, or diabolical, is at work. Society judges Derek by his altered appearance, forcing him to confront the tension between who he appears to be and who God created him to be. Ultimately, Derek realizes the shaman’s power exists only through his belief in it. When he understands that true authority resides in the Holy Spirit within him, the illusion of her control dissolves, and his transformation takes on new meaning.
While supernatural elements propel the narrative, the heart of the story lies in its emotional truth. Derek’s fear, doubt, and longing for meaning reflect the universal struggle between faith and fear, identity and image, belief and illusion. In Book Three: The Sixth Heaven, the Amazon jungle becomes more than a setting—it is a living metaphor for Derek’s fractured reality. From traumatized child to renowned surgeon to a man marked by mystery, Derek’s journey carries him from the luxury of Los Angeles into the raw wilderness of the Amazon, where the deeper he ventures, the closer he comes to rediscovering who he truly is.
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