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| Gothic tattoo 2 |
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| Written by i j |
| Tuesday, 04 January 2011 12:09 |
Yesterday we talked about some generalities of Tattoos (which didn’t needed to be Goth at all), well today we are going to get slightly into the Goth world of tattooing…
Most of the Goth tattoo symbolize the gothic culture ideals. I bet that there are a lot of people out there that find strange that we feel attracted by the darkest aspects of life but maybe that vision provides us a deeper insight of some life aspect that it’s worthless to deny… like death of the beauty in darkness (a twist of what people would call beauty).
That provide us with some “exclusive” themes for our tattoos, but the good part of Goth tattoo is that they tend to be rich in details and have a wide variety of elements to add to your skin making it quite easy to have original tattoos, way easier than if you choose tribal tattoos for example.
Mythological creatures, fantastic creatures, literature characters are just some examples of the variety I’m talking of, you can add even poetry to your tattoo which is quite hard to see elsewhere.
The last thing this article should do is to cut your creativity, So while we are going to take a look to the most common elements of a gothic tattoo, please by no way consider this to be a definitive list, just keep it in mind for creating your own original design…
Religious symbols:
One of the recurrent themes of gothic tattoo is the religious symbols, or a twist of them getting an “alternative religious symbol” for our tattoo. Maybe the most frecuent of all is the iron Gothic Cross with their thick lines that provides a feeling of deep. If you choose this as the base of your tattoo, keep in mind that you can add a lot of complements for making it unique, like Spiderwebs, creepers around the cross (that might be even breaking it), a red rose, skulls…
Another twist is to chance the Iron Cross for a tombstone of the same form or design, this tattoos are great for intricate superficial patterns or even poetry if it’s big enough, you can also add external elements like broken skulls, spiderwebs… a “hard to get” effect, probably only available for the best tattooists is a half-transparent ghost going across the tomb.
Another recurrent religious symbol is the pentacle, the upside down pentacle is a symbol for the devil, but when it it’s standing it represent the 4 elements (fire water hearth and and air) when they are inside a circle they represent the “unity” and the “wholeness”, it doesn’t matter which one you chose people wont recognize the second so people will believe that you are a follower of the devil anyway and you are going to give a lot of explanations.
(this is the devil’s one)
This design is usually made in simple traces in dark tones but you can mix it with other symbols or colors like violet blue or red (specially bloody red if you choose the diabolic version of the pentacle).
666:
Having talked about the pentacle we can’t avoid to talk about the number of the beast. It’s a quite popular number and lot of people tattoo it in a lot of different ways, it’s not one of my favorites specially by the great amount of misunderstandings that it’s going to cause.
Mendes Goat:
Let’s follow the so considered “satanic tattoos” and this time we going to talk of the “Mendes Goat”, the history f this character is quite fun because far from being a satanic goat or a representation of the devil, in deed this Goat represent Baphomet” that for those of you who didn’t meet her yet it’s a old Egyptian deity devoted to fertility (yeah, well, sex)… Whooohooooo how scared I am… Well, as the standing pentacle, lot of people don´t know this and you are going to have to give a lot of explanations about this tattoo too.
(Poor Baphomet that never did anything wrong…)
The “master combo brutal fatality” comes when in a clear misunderstanding of the reality people mix the Mendes Goat with the standing pentacle which means “wholeness”, I bet people get that Tattoo by pure ignorance but that tends to mean something like “the goodness of fertility it’s everything” which far from being satanic what says is: “Im a sex whore and the only thing I want is to fuck like crazy”… Well depending on who is wearing it, that could be quite scary in deed.
Ankh:
An Ankh is some short of cross with very little chance of get confused with the Christian cross. For simplifying stuff (which it’s bad done because the Ankh is a quite complex religious icon) the Ankh is an old Egyptian symbol which was considered to be the key of life (and death) it’s quite commonly found in old Egyptian tombs and was believed to allow the spirit of the death to reach the other life.
In my opinion this symbol do have a lot of sense inside the gothic icons
Crosses:
And with this I’m not talking about Christian crosses but about Nordic crosses that comes from the Germanic culture, in some cases you can see the inverted Germanic cross which represent the death:
Death “in-person”:
There are a huge ways to represent death for a gothic tattoo, but maybe the most common is the reaper which it’s represented by a humanoid figure armed with a scythe and dressed in a thick cape that makes impossible to see it’s face.
As a tattoo that it’s sometimes slightly poor so people sometimes get a naked reaper so we can see it’s skeleton which visually it’s quite more impactting, drawing at least the face of the reaper it’s usually enough for getting a richer tattoo.
Joker:
Another quite common tattoo (but not only in gothic tattoos) it’s the joker, the good part of the joker is that it gives you a lot of elements to play with, from an un-death scary joker to the sexists of the jokers dressed in a strong corset. Everything is welcome.
Vampires:
Another cool design it’s the vampire Tattoos, from the most intrincate designs to the most simples that are made only in black apart from some bloody lines near the lips. The good part of vampires is tat they give you the same array of elements to play whit as the jokers.
The world of vampires has another peculiarity and it’s a subgenere that has been generated around the “Luis Royo Vampires”, luis royo is a great drawer, the problem is that most people already know this drawing so tattooing a Luis Royo vampire it’s not going to be exactly the most original thing you can do.
In deed there is no reason to cut here the list, you could add a real army of symbols and a legion of creatures of the night to this list but the most important part is: If you are going to Tattoo a symbol, make sure you understand what that symbol means, if you are going to tattoo a creature, make sure that creature is what you want to get tattooed.
Hope this serves as an inspiration for creating your next Gothis Tattoo design.
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 04 January 2011 12:16 |