February 22nd, 2024
So I’ve already slipped on doing this thing monthly, but I’ll keep the intention to do so. I’ve also been tinkering about a bit with the other pages of this site, will be working on updating the tattoos/portfolio page next, but please head on over to the support page for the most important update/links. Free Palestine.
It’s a new year, so as is often the case we kicked off with that flash-painting-push. In a future blog I might talk through some of my sheets a bit, include photos of real life objects and events some designs are made from, show the references for others and the intentions for what’s left. Is that interesting? I don’t know. I like to talk about it to the person who is getting the design tattooed, but I also think what’s more important is just that people form their own appeal and relationship to a design from their own experiences. Been said many a time, but that’s meaning enough. I go outside, I see things, or I fester at home. I sketch in the corner of my bedroom by the soggy fireplace. I paint backwards and outline last and then a person decides they like something I stewed on enough to get it embellished in their skin (done in the correct(?) order this time) - pretty cool, right?
Thanks for that. Here are some tattoos done from my flash and drawn to the customers specifications
and here's a couple that have healed and one possibly still in the making. Thank you all again.
aforementioned flashings:
not everything makes it. the sketches all end up in a pile in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet, where maybe I'll browse through em again one day and they'll get re-homed only after de-wroming and a facelift.
some particularly good outings in the early months. this time last year I remember going on a solo walk to loch lomond and straying from the path (as I have a tendency to do) and getting a little stressed out in a particularly boggy area finding purses and wallets and beached boats and hoping to un-suction myself and stumble my way onto a path again before sinking or sundown. i'd jumped over rivers and streams that were easier to do going one way that were a lot less manageable looking returning the other, so i kept going forward. what actually happened was I reached a pristine beach-like area just at the same time as the sun breached from behind the clouds for the first time that day - no footprints, but there was a bouquet of flowers (i gave them a viking send off), and shortly enough I was in some less-boggy-more-solid grounds with japanese style wooden bridges and snow drops growing through moss quilts and deer eating tree bark in the backyards of some manor-house-castle-big-thing.
but that was last year, and i didn't blog it (til now). when you've got a father with parts of his brain removed it's extra damning to know that you can remember things. Speaking of remembering things, I've had to look up the names of these places I got driven to by my friends every single time. I just can't do names and numbers. put a melody to it and it's there forever.
on one day we went to the old carmichael estate. beautfiul grounds, one of my favourite types of forest (pine with a very mossy floor). it's a produce shop frontage from the road, you pass the deer then the cows and then the lone black goat (and then walk through the sheep herds to see the old well. chatty guys). just like in the mossy and boggier areas by loch lomond there were scarlet elf cups nestling in the piles of rotting branches and logs, everything was really impressively covered in the stuff (the moss), including what we assume to be a pet cemetary within the grounds of the old estate house. the views from the windows immediatley lead to narrow-trunked and thick forest. i liked that a lot.
we went to more old house grounds in douglas on the same day, i bought a particularly good terry's chocolate orange blondie from the local bakery and some kids came by on dirt bikes to leave their own doughnuts at the base of the remaining tower ruin of castle dangerous.
the next week we were chasing waterfalls at Talla
wrapping this up to work on the next flash sheet. i shall be guesting at my pal Will Dozer's shop The Electric Paintbrush back in London in april, 19th & 20th (the holiday for those who celebrate) please feel free to email slug.tatts@gmail.com or message me on instagram if you would like to get tattooed then, or here in glasgow, I can be tattooing you as soon as this weekend and that is pretty much always the case. Thank you for reading, i hope these words have found you well.
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