and each other in a dramatic red colourway
When I turned 21, one of my gifts was to have a tattoo done....I was living in Cape Town at the time and we adventured off to the dock area to a tattoo parlour...dressed in pale Chinos... Docksiders and Polo shirts....it was like stepping back in time....all grungey and dark and smelling of tobacco and sweatiness. Every inch of the walls were covered as if with peeling wallpaper crammed with bold and faded tattoo designs in the style of past decades, the paper on which they had been drawn the colour of ancient navigation charts. I chose a snake chasing a sparrow design and took a seat in a well worn vintage leather covered barber chair. The pain of the process was indescribable. Halfway through, a burly bunch of leather jacketed Hell's Angels burst in loudly. By now I thought that I would pass out and asked the guy to leave off the sparrow which did not really make it any less painful as the tattoo still had to be coloured in...An element of my tattoo has been partially hidden in this design in memory of that gift...