Body Branding — The Art of Tattooing

This one’s for a bit of fun…

My first Body Branding or Tattoo — Once healed I will replace this image.

As a designer and illustrator, I appreciate all forms of artwork, and one particular art form I’ve always admired is tattooing.

Have I ever considered becoming a tattoo artist?

Definitely not!

I’m probably far too much of a perfectionist. With conventional illustration, if you create something rubbish, you can throw it in the bin and start again. With digital design software like Photoshop or Illustrator, you can experiment with layers, hide things, move things around, or simply hit Command + Z or Ctrl + Z when you make a mistake.

Tattooing doesn’t quite work that way.

There are no erasers. No undo button. No Command + Z.

Once that ink hits the skin, it’s there.

If a tattoo artist makes a mistake, they can potentially ruin a customer’s experience — as well as damage their own reputation. Sure, there are ways of correcting tattoos, such as cover-ups or laser tattoo removal, but both can be expensive, inconvenient and, in some cases, pretty involved.

And this is probably why I’ve always admired the confidence of a good tattoo artist. Once they start putting ink into someone’s skin, there’s no going back.

So, having said all that… I recently decided to get my first-ever tattoo.

There was absolutely no bloody way I was going to do it myself. 😂

But I was going to design it.

Like a great brand design, I wanted my tattoo to have meaning and to be a little different from the usual tattoos or off-the-shelf flash designs. So, a couple of weeks ago, I sat down and started designing something that meant something to me.

The finished design is made up of three elements:

1. My immediate family — The names of the love of my life and my two adult kids.

2. A phrase from the Star Wars universe — A saying from one of the Star Wars series and movies. Three-quarters of my family love Star Wars… the other quarter loves her tattoos! 😂

3. The Yin Yang symbol — A nod to my martial arts background, as well as something that represents a philosophy that has become part of my way of life.

On the surface, that might not sound like anything particularly unusual.

But what makes the design special to me is how I wrote the names and the Star Wars phrase.

If you’re familiar with Star Wars, you’ll probably recognise the strange, alien-looking writing that appears throughout the movies and subsequent streaming series.

That writing system is called Aurebesh.

One of the many Aurebesh Alphabet images courtesy of www.omniglot .com website

I originally discovered the Aurebesh alphabet as an image, but, to my delight, after a bit of searching I discovered that there’s actually an Aurebesh OTF font available to download.

There was just one little problem…

Aurebesh doesn’t have capital letters.

Well… sort of.

If you type in capital letters using the font, the characters are flipped. It took me quite a bit of searching to work out what the hell was going on because the Aurebesh font I had downloaded didn’t appear to match the alphabet reference images I had found.

Once I figured that out, I was away.

I finished the tattoo design, showed it to the family to see what they thought, and then, a week later…

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  The linework created to assist the tattoo artist @saj.tat

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  The tonal render of the concept

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  And my forearm doing a scene from Bad Boy Bubby

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  Tattoo 4 hours after session with the wrap off.

This old spring chicken got his first-ever tattoo! 🐔😂

I booked in with @saj.tat from @tattoo_central_cockburn and spent the best part of three hours having my design turned from something on my screen into something permanently etched into my skin.

And I have to say…

I absolutely love it.

There’s something pretty cool about taking three things that are important to me — family, Star Wars and martial arts — and combining them into something that is completely personal.

And yes… I now understand why people get addicted to tattoos. 😁