a friend, a tattoo, a painting

The other day I was surprised to find a comment on my FB wall from my friend Chris Hold (of Sacred Heart Tattoo in Vancouver) that said, "Your arm is famous."

It turns out Sacred Heart had been featured in Inked Magazine and a tattoo that Chris did on my arm during my recent trip to Vancouver was one of the pictures included in the feature.

Needless to say, I was chuffed - for Chris and for me. It was such a fun tattoo experience and I think he did a great job on it - I'm glad it's been commemorated in this strange way. It's good to see a friend doing well at what he loves. And this weird thing of having my disembodied arm in a glossy American magazine feels somehow like it connects me and Chris across the great divide of this huge country in a "what-are-the-odds?" kind of way...

I digress...

* So here is a picture of my (healed) arm beside a picture of my arm in a magazine. Meta-arm? Meta-magazine? It's meta-something I'm sure!

(I'll talk about the other tattoo another day because it is also a fun story.)

* My arm, with the tattoo Chris did, pointing at a picture of Chris. Gosh, this is getting complicated.

So, I have no "grand meaning" for this tattoo, but there are several layers to why I love it.

I basically just picked it out of a book called "Vintage Tattoos" because I knew I was going to Vancouver and I wanted to get tattooed by my old friend and I knew he liked doing old stuff.

It is from a poster by Joe & Mabel Darpel. I read their story and liked that they were a husband/wive tattooing team. Mabel (the name of our first cat coincidentally) had also been a knife-thrower which I thought was pretty bad-ass. They lived in Waco, Texas - where my husband has family. What I'm trying to say is, there were tonnes of small details that made them resonate with me.

The Darpels (I'm just guessing here) probably got the imagery from the "Mercury Dimes" that were around from 1916-1945. Contrary to the name, these dimes did NOT depict Mercury. They depicted the "mythological goddess Liberty wearing a Phrygian cap, a classic symbol of liberty and freedom, with its wings intended to symbolize freedom of thought." (I stole that from Wiki...)

(I need more "freedom of thought" in my brain so it seemed like a good image for me.)

I really enjoyed learning all the random historical bits associated with this tattoo, especially about the Phrygian Caps. They show up all over the place!

So anyway, I recently decided that I would draw/paint all my tattoos (for the drawing practice and to write down the stories that go with them)

So I started with my Liberty Lady...

* Here you can see the book she came from, my sketch, and the beginning of my final version (which I traced from my sketch).

* Here she is inked in black. I'm still trying to get a handle on using ink and spit-shading and all that. A few of the laurel leaves went so badly that I completely blacked them out. I was pretty frustrated by the inking going badly but I decided to press on and finish the thing. I sometimes quit too easily...

* Here's the mess on my desk.

* Here's the finished thing, glorious screw-up that it is.

(I mean that in a healthy way - I'm glad I actually finished it. I think it has some good points and some bad points... but the main thing is that I finished it.)

Thanks for looking. And thanks to Chris for the awesome tattoo.

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