Octopi and Peacocks

-I am incredibly lucky as far as the tattoo designs I get to draw. Spoiled, I'd say;)
I got another request for another art nouveau peacock (online, from Chicago) today, as well as a walk-in appointment for a single peacock feather. I finished up my large drawing for the octopus with mendhi-style paisley swirling 'round beneath it, and am about to start a Artemis piece (she's a Greek goddess with a bow- look her up) and an ankle tattoo of woodcut Mandarin ducks. So exciting!

-On a whim I just Google image-searched "art nouveau peacock tattoo". Do it and check out the FIRST image that comes up!!! I am so silly to appreciate stuff like that, but I do. Hopefully Michelle doesn't have a million clones walking around with peacock sleeves. I know it would bother her! Luckily, it is pretty impossible to replicate, since the detail is small and pictures don't really do it justice. You can't see the whole design all at once.




Sometimes I think I could do pretty good predictions as to the new "it" animal in popular design and fashion. I could call it the "spirit animal of the collective subconscious". Hah. For instance we recently went through a big owl and deer phase. Owl and deer were on everything; t-shirts and album covers and wallpaper and TATTOOS. Now octopi and peacocks are super super popular, and tattoo culture is reflecting this. Both are extremely beautiful animals, some of the most interesting especially in terms of pattern. Both seem to me as having an exotic aura, rather than the deer and owls- whom were cool in a sort of folksy, graceful, quiet 70's era redux kind of way. (Watch while I relate this to people right now wanting something new and flashy and beautiful and intelligent, something WAY off the norm, and therefore predicting the election of OBAMA. HAHAHAHAHA!)I could see both hedgehogs and coral coming into style, maybe just cause they are instyle with ME, but seriously I did do a hedgehog tattoo last week..........

Also rising in popularity (not animal): cherry branch and feather rib tattoos for girls. I have recently given SO MANY first tattoos on the ribs. I always tell the brave girl that "any tattoo you get from now on will be a piece of cake!"


*That painting of the bird woman is a work by Fernand Khopff (1858-1921). It is called "Sleeping Medusa". So beautiful, right? I was either going to get it or the Aurthur Rackham Tempest piece (that I go) on my left upper arm.