So I get to tattoo a lot of Sailor Jerry style traditional tattoos, they're really an American Classic.
You may know the rum (which they completely run off his name and has nothing to do with the tattoo industry) but to understand traditional American tattooing you should also know about the man. You can read all that below :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailor_Jerry
Anyway, besides tattooing humans, I also do leathercraft, a craft passed down to me by my dad.
Making wallets in my spare time and tooling them with traditional tattoo pieces is really relaxing (until you mess something up) but I've found as a tattooer you need to diversify your art, find different ways of expressing yourself, different mediums, otherwise you get tunnel vision, your art suffers.
For this project I tooled some leather, dyed it and stitched it up to my arm rest in the studio.
Kind of coincidental my father taught me to tool and carve leather and I ended up switching mediums for humans, funny how things turn out.
This was a pretty cool request, some traditional friendship hands for 3 brothers with wallets to bind them all, a bit of a bastardized Sailor Jerry design but it's a classic.
Last but not least one of my favs, land ahoy!
Tattooing is one of my passions but you don't have to stop at one...
Peace out