Why a Slovenian footballer has Lord Shiva inked on his back and says India changed him

If you follow football, you've probably seen Luka Majcen score a goal and celebrate. You must also noticed that the Slovenian striker has Lord Shiva inked into his dreadlocks-style design on his back, along with the Mahamrityunjaya mantra tattooed alongside it.

For a footballer from Slovenia, walking around with one of Hinduism's most recognisable deities permanently on his skin, that's not exactly something you see every day.

The tattoo and what it says about his faith

Majcen sports a striking tattoo of Lord Shiva on his back, encircled by the Mahamrityunjaya mantra, and his devotion to Mahakal has left fans both impressed and curious about his spiritual journey. The Mahamrityunjaya mantra is one of the more significant verses in Hindu tradition, often chanted for protection and healing, so pairing it with Shiva's image suggests this wasn't a spur-of-the-moment tattoo parlour decision.

It reads more like something he sat with for a while before getting permanently inked.

It started with a book, not a tattoo studio

In an interview with the Indian Super League, Majcen actually traced the whole thing back to reading. He said he first came across the idea in the book Shantaram, which is the kind of detail that makes the story feel a lot less like a footballer chasing a trend and more like someone who stumbled onto something that stuck with him. Books have a way of planting things in your head that take years to actually surface, and that seems to be exactly what happened here.

A teammate's mother, a name, and a Google search

But the part that really sealed it came from somewhere completely unexpected, a teammate's mother who'd done a pooja. "I came into her head with the name Rudra," Majcen said. So naturally, he went and looked it up. "When I googled it, I saw this is one of Shiva's angry avatars. The roarer. The aggressive one," he explained. And something about that struck a nerve. It was around this point that he started practicing mindfulness more seriously, treating it less like a passing curiosity and more like something worth sitting with.

A transformation he credits to India

Looking back on the whole journey, Majcen doesn't dress it up. "This is a transformation that India made for me," he said admitting the country reshaped something in him that he didn't expect when he first arrived.Majcen is a Slovenian professional footballer who started his senior career with Interblock before moving to India in 2020 and signing with Churchill Brothers in the I-League. He finished as the second-best goalscorer of the 2020-21 I-League season with 11 goals in just 15 matches, and from there his career in Indian football kept climbing. He went on to win back-to-back I-League titles, first with Gokulam Kerala and then with RoundGlass Punjab, picking up the player of the season award and finishing as the league's top scorer with 16 goals during his time at Punjab.