This client wanted a reproduction of Anne Marie Zilberman‘s painting Larme d’Or, also known as Freyja’s Tears, a work often mistakenly attributed to Klimt. The meanings the client attached to this painting were numerous and I have to admit they sounded somewhat unclear to me, difficult to summarise.
That said, a painting or any work of art, however beautiful and compelling, doesn’t always translate outside its original context, and even less so as a tattoo. A photograph or a painting has physical boundaries that we instinctively fill with our imagination, but a tattoo has no such limits. You could frame it, of course, but inserting a drawing into a rectangular shape on the body rarely produces a pleasant result. The tattoo works differently and needs to be treated differently.
In this particular case that painting simply wouldn’t have worked on skin. I suggested a reinterpretation: the gold leaf cutting the face in two near the frame was replaced by a lock of hair, using a more realistic face and an approach better suited to tattooing. He agreed, and below you can see the result.
If you’d like to know more about the painting that inspired this piece, I’ve included a couple of links below.
Dentro l’opera: “Le lacrime di Freyja” e la falsa attribuzione a Klimt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freyja
