Lu -- Tattoo Concept sketch -- with notes

Lu -- Tattoo Concept sketch -- with notes, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

Lu is a manager at Look 'n Listen in Cresta. He and I started chatting when my special order of the band SUN KIL MOON arrived.

He said, 'Yeah! When I saw that someone else in the world was into Sun Kil Moon, I thought, "Hey! There's hope for music in this country!" And then when I overheard you asking about Micah P Hinson, I thought, "I've gotta talk to this guy." Yeah!'

So we started chatting. He's a muso, into roots music and alt.rock. When I showed him the list of artists I was steadily trying to track down, he knew almost every one of them. (And, uh, almost every single one of them was unavailable in this country. But hey.)

And then he asked what I do, and I told him I'm an artist. And showed him my 'Right Arm' tattoo. And he told me about his idea for a tattoo. So I said I'd give it a shot, with embellishments.

So this is the result. Lu's original brief was for a tower with two instruments of power, like a hammer and an axe, or something like that, with energy radiating from the tower.

It's for his upper arm, so all of the elements going off the edge of the page are meant to go all the way round the arm. For me, that sorta roots the tower to his arm, and seats it well. It's anchored, potent. And the arms holding the instruments of power are kinda like musicians' arms. And the instruments are musical instruments.

This is really just a raw and rough concept design. It's nowhere NEAR what the tatt itself would look like. But hey. Things have gotta start somewhere.

I've just sent it to him. So I'm awaiting his response. Chances are it won't be totally to his taste. Cos I've added loads of my own mythology into it.

I sketched this in ArtRage 2.2 on my Toshiba Tecra M4.