+ This, too
I’m coming to the end of a six-week, nonstop tattoo and design binge. When I schedule client projects months in advance, I group them tightly, knowing the stretch will be intense. It’s a method born of rhythm, keeping my hands and mind in a continuous tattoo state. The designs begin to mirror one another, connected by invisible threads that form only when I’m fully immersed.
During this phase I’m outlining, setting foundations for the later fill-in sessions. That structure, though consuming, grants me rare evening hours at home, time to breathe, to draw, to let other kinds of work take shape. Exhaustive, but deeply satisfying. It’s the build-up before the bloom.
Next week, my art week, I’ll complete a large painting commission in the same style as the Trinity series. After that, I plan to shelve that meticulous approach for a while and move into something more chaotic, less bound by geometry or order. After a year of painting with surgical precision, I feel a need to unlearn control, to see what’s left when the borders dissolve. I wonder if I’m even capable of true looseness anymore. Perhaps I’ll find out.
The commission itself arrived like many of my tattoo projects do: a client offered a budget, a size, and total trust. “Do what you see for me.” I’ve been spoiled by that kind of faith, it carries equal parts freedom and gravity. What comes through me is for them, the eternal wearers or bearers of what I make.
A few weeks ago, I took a morning walk along Walhalla, my favorite winding road. My mind was heavy with many thoughts and many small griefs. I went there to listen: to the scrape of leaves across pavement, to deer moving through brush, to the bright flicker of robins darting close. They seemed unafraid, almost deliberate in their nearness.
One robin perched on a fence line as I approached, then glided down to the ground. The next fence post held another, repeating the gesture. Then another, and another. A living loop. It felt like a glitch in the fabric of Maya, or the echo of an idea folding back on itself, an infinite regress made visible.
In that moment I remembered: all things pass. The noise, the ache, the human weight of it all. That memory is both the root and the relief. The painting I’m working on now honors that messenger, the robin, and all that came before it.
𓆦
