"How did you Die?"
This one was a little more complex than the "Death or Glory" tat to come up with. I wanted it to sync with the first tat both in imagery and purpose, so again it brings across a certain outlook, or philosophy. That is achieved with the use of a skull/crossbones/banner image, and the text is from another inspiration poem, this one entitled "How did you Die", written by Edmund Vance Cooke.
After deciding which part of the text to use, I scoured the 'net to find a good-looking image and came up with the one below.
After messing about in photoshop, I got it edited down to just the image and greyscaled it. Since I can't draw for shit, I got someone who could draw for me to come up with the banner incorporating the image as a battle standard.
I took this down to Jeff at the Portsmouth Tattoo Studio to see what he thought of it. He thought it would be a lot easier and look at lot better if the banner was draped directly from the bones rather than using the battle standard, so I went home and played with the image in photoshop. Once it was done, I agreed with him, it does look better. So I took that pic down, we chatted some more, and he was very worried about the text, there being so much of it to cram into such a small space. Many revisions later, this was the final article we agreed upon, it was as big as possible without having to wrap the entire image around my upper arm.
The tat itself was done in three parts: firstly I printed off the text on its own (just took the above picture and removed everything that wasn't text), which was inked in, then he used just the skull/crossbones image, and incked that in, and thirdly he did the banner compltely freehand. Took a while, but it was worth it. Here's a couple pics of the finished article, taken about 30 mins after it was done and edited to try to make it clearer. I'll eventually get round to taking some pics of it now it's settled in. You might note that the "slow" in the third line is looking weak and faded compared to the others, I got this touched up when I had the dagger tat done.
And now that it's settled in, this is how it looks (with fresh touch-up)
