Old beginnings part 3

The concept for this tattoo was very strong in my customers mind. It's theme is the power of nature to triumph over mans efforts, for me the tattoo as much represents that as it does man attempts to replicate nature with technology. Most of the imagery came from my customer. However the heart, robotic dragonfly and Leonardo's flying machine were my suggestions.

I was very keen to have elements that overlapped in ethos, so the cybernetic bird on the forearm in amongst the ivy and the 'real' bird surrounded by something man made.
The real challenge was to make sure that the colours complemented each other whilst enhancing the rhythm of the design, it was also part of the brief that the colours be muted as much as possible.

When I carry out work like this I rarely have a fixed design in mind and often will collage images together as I work directly on the skin with a mixture of hand drawn elements and stenciled ones. It's usually the case that several different options will be looked at before the basic design is committed as a tattoo. Even then I find outlining almost everything in a grey lines leaves us some potential to modify the design as we proceed with it.

It takes a great deal of trust on my customers part to allow me to work in this way. However I consider the customers input as essential to the process. The tattoo becomes a collaboration rather than just a commissioned artwork with little input form the client, and I'd like to think the results speak for themselves.

Bird sleeve healed pics

Finally managed to get some healed pictures of this sleeve. I'm really happy with the end result and am grateful to my customer for taking some of my ideas on board.
It's not often I take on work that isn't Traditional Japanese style work, but when an idea as interesting as this comes along I push the design and my tattooing as far as I can.