SKiN&BoNE: Lejre : "Burn & Pillage Tour" 2013

Well we were at Leje again for our 13th year. Much has changed during that time but we are still happy to be there and it is the high point of our year. When I started at Lejre it was to do experimental archaeology and I had no permanent placement. I've tattooed in the Iron Age village, the Stone age area, the Sacrificial bog and Ravnhøj (the Viking area) depending on the designs and techniques I was researching. The last several years Lejre has organized a small (growing) Viking Market which focuses on everyday Viking life and we're very happy to be part of this family :-)
I recently found this little flash from the past on Politikans homepage:
http://politiken.dk/poltv/nyheder/indland/article539277.ece

Continued some "Colinesian" patterns around an older Bronze age Swastika design. We'll be adding more rows of patterns as well as continuing up and over the shoulder.

Thorgrimr is from South Tyrol and I had the pleasure of tattooing him last year. This year he came with several friends and I had the honour of tattooing them all. After a year of serious thought Thorgrimr decided he wanted a old Solar Cross/Sun Wheel/Hakenkreutz/Swastika tattoo. Despite the maligned reputation of this symbol and the problems he could encounter living in Austria, due to his age and reasons behind it I could not object to doing it

Tyrolean comrade at arms received a bound rune in negative

Another Tyrolean, Olvir, with his bound rune in negative

Nikolaj received an archer to balance the longboat he received a few years back and wants to make a tradition of getting a tattoo each summer :-)

Njörðr is an animal/zookeeper at Lejre who wanted to continue an idea he had of different Pazyryk animal tattoos on his lower leg... unfortunately the first was done by machine by another artist and a little too small, so it hasn't aged well :-(

We decided it was best to go a little larger with the second one :-)

Most of these designs are based on tattoos found on the Pazyryk mummies in the 40's and another again in the 80's. The Pazyryk mummies's skin is shrunken, stretched and disshreveled over 2500 years I've been to see the mummies and rather than copying the designs as they are I prefer to do them as they might have been. I tend to give them more negative space, straighten out some lines as well as round out all curves and spirals to make a much more pleasing composition that I hope will hold as well as the mummies have :-)