A tattoo

The aim of this exercise is to produce a tattoo based on the word ‘Mum’ that can also be used for a Mother’s Day card. I began by looking into the history and different styles of tattoo.

There is evidence that tatooing was already practiced in the 4th century BC. Historically, it has had signifance beyond being decorative: to brand criminals, for healing purposes, for spiritual purposes; and to identify individuals. Tatooing became more commonplace in Europe with the advent of exploration and trading with the Far East – with sailors returning with tattoos.

There are many different styles of tattoo. With the exception of realistic tattoos, I think that any of them would be suitable for this project. I want the image to ‘look like’ a tattoo, so I’m going to avoid the watercolour and illustrative styles. I think that the tribal, Japanese, or New School styles could work quite well. I love the geometric patterns in the tribal tattoos.

In order to think more about what style might work well for the ‘Mum tattoo’, I started looking into tribal, Japanese and New Style tattoos more and sketching elements of them in my sketchbook. I also started looking into font styles used in tattoos and also elements that might traditionally be associated with Mother’s Day e.g. flowers etc. This is a tricky brief without knowing about more about the person the tattoo is intended for and their Mum. Working on stereotypes this is a tricky brief because it’s quite a feminine subject area but intended for a tattoo on a man.

I am wondering about taking something that is a stereotypically feminine object e.g. a flower, or a heart and then using geometric patterns from tribal tattoos to make it into something a little more masculine. Maybe taking the more traditional ‘Mum’ tattoo sketched above and turning it into something more contemporary.

I started playing with a heart design. The top image is mainly based on patterns from Norse tattoos. The second design down based on tribal tattoos made me thing of M. C. Escher and infinite loops. So for the bottom three sketches I played with making a heart infinite loop and then playing with patterns on the different edges. I think that it makes sense to have the text ‘Mum’ within the design – this will also help to link it back to more traditional ‘Mum’ tattoos. I played with having blocky Escher-type writing; however, I decided to use a plain and traditional tattoo font. I considered using different colours for the different edges of my final design. However, in the end I decided to make it all in blue. For the final design, I drew it up in blue biro.

I think that produced at a smaller scale this tattoo could work. Retrospectively I think that the version with blocky text linked through the heart looks better better. In general there is a bit too much white space in the middle of the heart. I guess red would be a more conventional colour for a heart tattoo but I think that I prefer it being in a more subtle colour.