Today I am back at Northern Black, adding the finishing touches to my left arm and, if there is time, perhaps adding something new.
My wife has wanted me to get a tattoo for about thirty-six years. I resisted, delayed, considered, avoided, and generally failed to act with any great urgency. Then, with sixty approaching, I thought: well, why not? Naturally, having finally decided to get a tattoo, I did not start with something small and discreet. I went straight to a full sleeve.
This is not entirely out of character.
So this seems a good moment to explain what is already there.
Not because every mark on the arm is part of some perfectly planned symbolic code. It is not. Some of it is story. Some of it is family. Some of it is myth. Some of it connects directly to Panimálay. Some of it is simply there because I saw it, loved the look of it, and wanted to carry it.
That matters too.
The upper part of the arm is built around Rán and her nine daughters from Norse myth. Rán is associated with the sea, with drowning, with nets, and with the dangerous taking-power of deep water. Her daughters are the waves: not the sea as one simple thing, but the sea in different moods, movements and forms.
That myth has stayed with me for a long time.
It also found its way, indirectly, into Panimálay. The Tairnic creation myth owes something to that old northern sea-imagery. Not copied across directly, because that is not how I like to build things, but transformed. The idea of the sea as mother, grave, danger, giver and taker became part of how I thought about a seafaring people explaining where they came from and what kind of thought world they lived in.
That is often how inspiration works for me. A historical or mythic idea catches somewhere in the mind, and later it reappears in a changed form. Not as a borrowed ornament, but as part of the deep soil of another culture.
The left arm is sea-focused, so I also wanted Jörmungandr in it. But I did not want the usual circular World Serpent image. There is nothing wrong with that version, but it felt too fixed for what I wanted. I wanted the serpent to move through the arm rather than sit on it as a badge. A current. A boundary. Something old and alive running through the design.
Below that are the warriors.
They came from an image I saw in Mat’s studio: a shield-line in a longship, done with a woodcut feel. I loved the look of it immediately. It had that carved-stone, cut-wood, old northern quality I wanted. Those figures are not there because they carry a complicated private meaning. They are there because they looked right. They were cool. Sometimes that is enough.
The frog with the quill is there too, because of course he is.
The rune band has a more personal purpose. It draws on Isar Oakmund’s rune books and describes my wife and children. I am not going to unpack that in detail here, because some things can be visible without being fully explained. But that part of the arm is family. It gives the sleeve a private layer beneath the myth and the sea and the warriors.
The lower wyrm is there because I liked it.
Again, that may sound too simple, but I think it is important. Not everything on the arm is there because it carries a solemn hidden meaning. Some of it is there because I loved the look of it, and that matters too.
What I wanted overall was illustration rather than hard-line geometry. I did not want the arm to become a rigid diagram of Nordic art. I wanted movement, figures, story, sea, serpent, marks, humour and recognisable northern influence, but all brought together as something alive on the body.
That is where Mat Bone’s work has been so good.
I should also say that this is not something I am doing in isolation. The rune work comes through Isar Oakmund’s rune books, and it was Isar, at Northern Black, who suggested Mat as the right artist for the piece. That was very good advice.
Mat is not just applying a tattoo. He is illustrating the arm. There is a real difference. He has taken a mix of ideas — Rán, waves, Jörmungandr, warriors, runes, a frog with a quill, a lower wyrm, and the general brief of “Nordic, but illustrative rather than stiff” — and made them work together.
That takes skill.
The more the arm develops, the more I appreciate the judgement involved. It would have been easy for this to become cluttered. It would have been easy for it to become too geometric, too flat, too much like separate pieces competing for space. Instead, it is becoming something that flows.
Sea at the top. Serpent through it. Human figures below. Rune-work. Wyrm. Story and shape running down into the hand.
It is not a neat museum label. It is not a scholarly reconstruction. It is not a purity test for Norse art. It is a living mixture of things I care about, things I enjoy, and things that have worked their way into my imagination over years.
That feels right to me.
My interests have never stayed neatly in separate boxes. History feeds fiction. Myth feeds worldbuilding. Art feeds story. A tattoo seen in a studio suggests a line of warriors. A rune book becomes a way of carrying family. An old sea myth becomes part of a creation story in a world that does not exist, except that it increasingly does.
So today is partly about finishing a tattoo.
But it is also about looking at the odd, layered way a person carries their own influences. Some are written down. Some become books. Some become maps and languages and religions. Some end up in ink.
And some, apparently, become a frog with a quill.
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