Artistic Process: Hand tattooing on the road

Just a few smaller pieces tattooed by hand tools on the road 

Enjoy!

 Tattooed a Pictish Wild Boar on fellow tattooist Rocco at the Milano Convention

Even got the pigs knuckles to line up :-)

Unfortunately 2 out of my 3 full day appointments didn't show up in Milano :-( However this left me open to do alot of smaller bound runes on lucky clients

 A sword and pentangle between conventions.

Straight/clean lines and a little dotshading.

 I've done several tattoos of Loki's Children over the years... the Fenris Wolf, Midgaards Serpent, even Sleipner. However this is the first chance I've had to do Hel, Mistress of the Netherworld  Thanks Andy for enduring over 8 hours of hand poking Hel, at the Brighton Tattoo Convention.

Aside from some engravings from the 18th-19th Century and a few Death Metal Albums there really isn´t any historical depictions of Hel, who is suppose to be half woman and half corpse. I tried to keep things simple and symbolic... the Skull for death balances with The Flower of Life pattern and then to signify it was a woman. her the long hair is braided into a body or cross form. I'd still like to go in and add some more of the Flower of Life pattern to fill out the shoulder more and perhaps a little shading in the teeth... but that is all for this year

 I did this dragon years back , under and around the bicep. He had some colour Haida work on the outerside already. Then Xed added the Flower of Life pattern to tie it all together. Now we continued down the arm over the elbow and pit of the elbow at Brighton with a Mammoth hunting scene done by hand.

He gives me all the difficult pieces :-)

 A Haida Tree???

Despite being an indigenous people living close to nature and being extraordinary carpenters and carvers I've never seen a depiction of a tree in their artwork. This gave me alot of freedom but was still very frustrating to design. Now that the tree is in place we will be adding a Wolf and a Mountain Lion on each side of the trunk. I've mentioned the "Eb & Flow" effect I use when designing these pieces and this is a good example, where the shading works off of the line and shifts from side to side of the design. So depite being very square and graphic still provides alot of movement in the piece.

 A petroglyph from Norrköping, Sweden tattooed at the Tattoo Meltdown in Trollehätten

I visited this site back in 1997 guided personally by the head of the National Museum as it is on private property and difficult to find. I tattooed the figure very solid, but wanted to keep the energy spiral lighter by shifting to dotshading. I'm very happy to have finally gotten a chance to tattoo it after all these years.

I did this Polar Fox on Susanne several years back at the first Copenhagen Ink Fest. Being a Polar Fox we wanted to do it as light as possible... as white wouldn't have been a viable option we opted for greywash (this is the reason it is lighter than the other figures).

She contacted me again recently to have the Polar Fox framed in and the back filled out with a Raven and Eagle on either side... Here is the result finally healed