This sleeve was done in two different stages three years apart from each other.
The first stage was the upper arm, with an almost gothic theme and with diverse meanings.
The blindfolded goddess that, besides luck, according to the client’s personal interpretation represents his grandmother, with a blood-red tear representing the pain of loss.
On the inner arm a skull, obviously a memento mori, enriched by a clock with visible gears basically set in the cranium.
An idea that I still like a lot.
Right now I don’t remember if the hour on the clock (5:10) had some particular meaning for the client, anyway, this work was completed in 2014 and looked like it would remain a stand-alone piece.
Three years later the client returned to continue his forearm. I don’t exactly remember his initial idea but I think it had something to do with human folly, the conflict between good and evil, the fact that there is evil in all of us or maybe that we are the ones creating it. I honestly don’t remember, I’m pretty much guessing by looking at the tattoo 😀
The idea we came up with was a sort of Mr. Heisenberg, from the Breaking Bad TV series, who is handling test tubes, and an evil figure on the inner arm, basically a Mr. Hyde.
In a nutshell, a sort of modern-day Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
As for Mr. Hyde, it was easy to design the subject using some reference pictures to recreate the atmosphere of late 19th century London streets, while for Heisenberg I initially thought of using an image from the tv series but, besides not appreciating photographic copies, I didn’t find anything that could help me. So I took my camera, put myself in position and recreated the scene that I later used as reference to develop the final version.
At first I must admit that I was a bit skeptical about the lapse of time between the upper arm and forearm, but now that it’s finished I find that they complement each other perfectly.
The only downside is that I had to wait almost a year to be able to take a picture of the healed piece, the bright side is that you can see how my work looks like years later, since the upper part was completed in 2014.
Now it seems that this client is evaluating a biomechanical sleeve. I can’t wait 😀
Look at the pictures of the working process below.
