After a half-stocking of tattoos from me back in my Voluta days, and a more recent shoulder blade cover-up, Christian asked me to do something much more challenging, by totally reworking his left upper arm and shoulder. It has a lot of sprawling tribal work done over 10 years ago, and he wanted to turn it into a floral tribute half-sleeve and shoulder cap for his wife and son. Christian's tattoo reminds me of the Talking Heads song (Nothing But) Flowers. "There was a factory, Now there are mountains and rivers" David Byrne had it right.
I didn't have any examples worked up for Christian when we started, just a bunch of different images taped all over a half-dozen pieces of paper. The only stylistic promise: Washy Watercolor flowers....
Here it is 5 hours later:
Orchids up close, with a washy tree branch in purple, and the bottom of the tattoo ending in watercolor-inspired ink blotches:
Sweet peas up close with the dry-brush style blue and green smearing across the underside. It was a BIG challenge trying to keep the style loose, as I always want to push things crisp in my designs...
Marigold up close, kept it sharp and washy, with a little old-school influence mixed into the edging of the petals. Wanted to maintain a very raw feel to the approach:
Here's what he brought me:
So the day before Christian's first session on this design, I had already figured out how to turn his tribal into vines and tree roots, where the flowers would sprout from, but the coverage and direction just wasn't there. Randomly looking through reference images, I hit a big well of inspiration. I talked to him on the phone after going off on a completely new tangent of ideas. I had a dozen new images emailed to him and printed out and I was like a kid on Christmas Eve. The day of the appointment I started by placing the flower stencils and finishing the rest with a surgical marker.
The Stencil is set and we're ready to tattoo:
Session 1 complete. More to go on the back and sides.
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