This is actually the cap of a sleeve I recently finished, and the lower half is in blackwork with the top being this. That is why the eagle is not in color. So, yeah, a random tattoo phone pic. Not the best pic, but a really cool piece to do as it is fun doing spacy color stuff.
I did a bunch of these last month (Sept 2023) because I wanted to do them. Some colored them yellow, some stuck with just black. My reason’s were many, but mostly it is because I believe liberty is the most important thing to have in a society, and this little snake is a symbol that goes along with the idea of defending liberty when it is being threatened.
The timber rattlesnake, like the bald eagle is unique to the Americas, so part of it’s significance and reason it was chosen for a very important flag is that it serves as a means of showing a separate identity from the Old World. That old world (European world) wasn’t very hot on liberty.
The Gadsden flag which sported this image is a important historical American flag with a yellow field depicting this timber rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike. Beneath the rattlesnake are the words “DONT TREAD ON ME”.
This flag was created by Christopher Gadsden, a South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress and brigadier general in the Continental Army who designed the flag in 1775 during the American Revolution. He gave the flag to Commodore Esek Hopkins, and it was unfurled on the main mast of Hopkins’s flagship USS Alfred on December 20, 1775. Two days later, Congress made Hopkins commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy. He adopted the Gadsden banner as his personal flag, flying it from the mainmast of the flagship while he was aboard. The Continental Marines also flew the flag during the early part of the war. That was from Wikipedia. You can read their brief history of the flag HERE. I’m not going to give my own history of it, which slightly differs from the version Wikipedia now has of it. I can’t outshout Wikipedia. Instead I will recommend you look up the history of this flag and read multiple sources. It is loved by those who believe in and defend liberty. It it loathed by those who hate personal freedoms. You can straight up know what type of person is writing about it by what they say. Anybody hating on it is someone who would enslave you or imprison you if they could for not falling in line and behaving as they want you to behave. Anyone painting it as belonging to any one type or group of people besides all people who believe in liberty are simply trash humans.
What is liberty? It the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.
Note the term authority. The authority is any person or group that has the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. Note it says “power or right” in that sentence. The mob is the greatest power, and though it has no right to oppress, it is the most likely to oppress, make decisions, and enforce obedience with it’s might. Governments can be evil, but the mob is the worst.
Here is a screenshot of the current definition result on google taken on 10/27/2023.
So, enough on all that. You can and should look up as much information on what liberty is and why it is important. Books have been written, and thousands of essays exist. I need not cover it because it has been done.
So… why did I run a special on this snake? Why did I want to tattoo it on people?
I had three primary reasons.
1) I wished to create dialog and expose Nazi like scum on social media.
I ran an advert on various platforms and dialog did happen. There were those who love freedom and believe in equality who really liked this. There were also nasty people who attacked it either from ignorance or hatred. There were a few progressive racists, some antisemites, and a couple USA hating people, but mostly just self hating people wanting everyone else to suffer with them.
I had assumed I’d get hard right and far left haters both, but only leftists shouted the hate. They often considered this a right wing image. It is odd to me how if a leftist hates a thing it becomes right wing affiliated to them, and if a right winger hates a thing it becomes left wing associated. This snake, is neither.
2) I wanted a reason to talk about the history and meaning of this image on social media and within my studio face to face with people. Share it’s history and the concepts of liberty. Get people thinking and looking things up. I succeeded in that as as well.
3) and most importantly I wished to help people draw a line in the sand regarding their beliefs. Folks who would get such a tattoo obviously believe in freedom from oppression and liberty. To stand up against the mob and a government when it acts tyrannical is a tough thing though with sometimes heavy consequences. Having a symbolic tattoo of something helps draw that line in the sand and increases a person’s willpower. To be branded with a symbol of liberty is to declare yourself a champion of it. To watch people destroy liberties or to submit to those who take away such things is pretty hypocritical if you have such a tattoo. I wished by tattooing it on people to create champions of liberty. To make it so people were more apt to speak up in their own defense and in the defense of others.
In that aspect I do not know how well I succeeded. Only time will tell.
To finish up on this post I’ll say this. Our personal liberties in the USA are hardcore under attack. Cancel culture is the most obvious example on most peoples minds, and has hurt me severely over the last few years. It isn’t just that though. Yes, the leftist mob and Democratic party are going crazy with it so you may think to blame them, but Republicans are just as bad even though they do it less often. Comparing the democrats and republicans when it comes to cancel culture is like comparing rapists and saying Person A Rapes daily while person B rapes just once a week, and then claiming one rapist is better than the other. Nobody should be doing it. Then we have our lovely government and our schools… dictating how to behave, what is ok to say and think, and how we should act. They (our government) are becoming more and more restrictive.
We who believe in liberty must keep speaking up. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone. Not just in our own countries, but in all countries. We who believe in personal freedoms MUST continue to speak because some can’t, and many fear to do so. Don’t fall into the trap of speaking only on subjects that effect you. More freedom, not less should be the goal in all things.
It should be our goal to make it so all people can live as they choose, think how they wish to think, express themselves how they wish to express themselves, and say what they wish to say without harm coming to them.
The only limitations that should ever exist in this is if the person’s actions harm another person’s liberty, body, or property.
Some may argue that property should not be included in that, but they do not think deeply enough. To destroy or take another’s property is to take from their very life. For example, if a person earns $25. per hour and buys a $2000. bicycle they have just traded 80 hours of their waking life for that bicycle. More really, because it took more time considering commute to and from work, plus the government stole probably 30% of the money they earned meaning they’d need work even more hours. So, even if it was just 80 hours, why should another person have the right to steal 80 hours of their life? No, property should be included. A person’s liberty, body, and property are important.
I explored this idea with art long ago when I was a child. If I believed my nostalgic memory of my creations it may be that I did it better then.
The story of Noah’s Ark and the flood intrigued me in ways it possibly shouldn’t have at that point in my life. I saw many holes, but many truths. I also saw the art in the story.
The writers knew what they were doing.
They painted a picture that gave us beauty while leaving just the right amount of dirt to juxtapose in a manner to entrap a person’s imagination.
I can’t really go on about all of that because it would be an entire book, but I will go on about the dove and the raven. That is what this painting is about.
The story, even painted in glittering gold did not paint these birds as we later view them in the story. The raven and the dove both did their jobs. The raven wasn’t selfish, and the dove was not a glowing beam of pure white in the sky with it’s olive branch.
I’m going to talk about the second bird in the story first. The dove. The dumbfounded, awestruck, bedraggled, disheveled, and disarrange in all ways that can be imagined dove.
Look at that dove. When I was working on this my working title was “Seen Some Shit!”
As in the dove has seen some shit.
When the dove enters the scene in the story my vision of this poor bird is not the one which I have seen so many times put forth by churches and related religious groups. It is not the vision I usually would create if someone wants requests a dove from me. If it is a dove related to Christianity or other Abrahamic faith ideas I make if pretty, glorious, and strong.
Even here I kept it more pristine than I imagine. I kept it more sane. The reality if this story is taken to be true is that this bird would be dumbfounded.
Imagine you are the dove, living your dove life and free of worry while doing dove things. Then poof, you have something happen to your mind, making you feel an urgency to travel, then enter a large man made structure that is full of animals including those which prey on you. Something makes you calm, but your instincts say “That thing will eat me if it gets a chance.” Then imagine the man made structure is closed up, starts moving around, screams of humans are heard outside as rain pounds hard. Then it begins to move hardcore, you are locked in a space with your natural predators, dark, smelly, hot, moving in a way you and I can’t truly imagine because there has been no storm even a tenth that size since. It seems to never stop and when it does you still are moving. Finally you emerge. The other animals have not been allowed freedom. You see the world and it is water. You have been chosen, called, you know your duty. You watch as the raven performs it’s duty. Also called, also the elect of God. The raven is smarter than you are as a dove. Stronger, wiser, and a better survivor. It flies out to do it’s job and you watch. You are in shock, but you are the elected. You have no choice.
The raven is now gone. You are a dove without much reasoning, but a species of the wild. You know not if the raven lives, but it is your turn. You are sent out over the waters. You see bits of land, but your dove instincts aren’t being met. Eventually they are, and you succeed, as was ordained by the Word.
So, doves and pigeons can’t eat carrion. They also instinctively need to build themselves a nest and instinctively know the way home. Genesis says that Noah sent out a “dove,” but in all really, it was not likely to be the European Turtle-Dove, but instead the Rock Pigeon, whose biblical Hebrew name yonah, used in the text is translated as either pigeon or dove. I went with a disheveled dove instead of a rock pigeon because if I used a rock pigeon the iconography would be a fail for sure. Nobody would get it, and instead of this painting representing an image of a dumbstruck dove on a mission from God, we would have a pigeon wanting some crackers on a ledge. Anyways, this dove/pigeon was the perfect choice for this job. It would by nature have went searching for twigs and branches to build itself a nest. Until twigs and branches were found there was no way to be getting off that ark and letting loose the animals because the circle of life demands vegetation to exist.
So what was the raven doing? A lot of ignorant ass people and preachers have painted the raven’s flight as a fail. Seems weird for a preacher to do so, but whatever… Like the dove, a raven has instincts. It lives in a certain manner and does specific things. It is (unlike a dove) extremely intelligent too. The writers of the text included in the bible were very aware of the ravens nature. They did not state a specific purpose to the raven’s flight in the text I’d guess because they assumed all would understand it. People were more sparse and animals more plentiful in those days. We humans were closer to and understood the natural world much better then.
The raven is a carrion eater. It can eat the dead stuff, but unlike what even many preachers and rabis assumed… eating death on the sea… they can’t do that. Why? Swimmers they aren’t.
Land had been sighted before the raven was sent out. The tops of the mountains it says. Sending a raven first was to make sure the waters had receded enough for the raven. It needs shelter and food. If it has shelter and food then humans can hope. The raven flew around a good long time finding not what it needed, but when it did, it was gone. This signaled the time of dove. The dove could not have told Noah there was land to give hope. The dove instinctually would have just kept returning.
If you are not a bible reader some notes on timing here. The flood did not last just 40 days. That is what most people will say. 40 days and 40 nights is how long the rain poured in a crazy manner to initially flood everything. It then continued to rain for 110 days more. After that they floated the flooded earth for another seventy-four days before a mountain top was found. Another month and a half almost till the raven was brought forth to do it’s job. Noah didn’t leave the boat until couple months after the dove had taken off on it’s third flight. If you want to be a stickler and read the chronology and add it all up we end up with the whole event being 371 days, and some animals being in the ark for up to 378 days.
How could they look so darn pretty like the goofy illustrations always show in the little kid books?
Now, if you are or are not religious this painting and my babble about the state of the dove should still be cool. The story of the flood is old. The great deluge happened and all peoples with ancient stories of the past have a version of it. The oldest form of genesis with this story in it comes from 1000 BCE. The poems of Gilgamesh Epic poems tell the story similarly including our raven and dove, but with an additional swallow added in. The oldest written record of the story is from 2150 BC. Think on that. Until recently that is about as old as it got. The oldest human manuscripts ever found were estimated to be from possibly 2600 BC. Nobody thought humans could even make such things before 2200 BC. until recently.
Science. Oh the prickly pear that science has become in this F’d up century. It isn’t just science attached to medicine and biology that has turned into some sort of pay for consensus crud instead of a quest for knowledge. Nor is it just “climate” scientists who are pushing dogma back and forth for dollars. Sadly it has spilled into paleontology and general biology as well. Everything really. It is sad. Nonetheless, even with the “scientists” and historians who specialize in the fields that would be touching on this, a general consensus is there. Two actually. One is that we had a huge worldwide flood. Dates don’t match up to those in Exodus though. Two, we had a catastrophic almost worldwide flood that caused a flooding where most of the people existed. This would according to science be the flood talked about in all the ancient texts because it would make more sense when looking at timelines.
Personally, I think they need to stop acting like they know things they are guessing at. We (humans) don’t know crud. We discover new things constantly and find things we believed yesterday are total hogwash today. All of the sciences are in their infancy. Someday if humans don’t kill themselves off as a species I think people will back at us the way we now look back on people of the bronze age. They will wonder at our ignorant belief’s and find interest in us primarily through varied lenses of wondering how we somehow became them.
So… The painting. You can get a print of it HERE – The Dumbfounded Elect Art Prints.
It is available as nice art prints, lower cost posters, and even as an expensive puzzle you can give to someone as a gift.
Make sure to tell them what the working title was. That would still be the title, but some places I sell prints wont allow the word shit. Gotta keep the title consistent.
Rant time!
I must remember to never do reverse image searches on my work. Every time I do I end up pissed and start putting Huge watermarks on my pictures of paintings, drawings, and tattoos. Thieves! So many thieves, and they are often not in countries where you can do anything about it. Then if they are you usually find them to be some jackass without a pot to piss in and nothing to lose so they don’t give a crud. They aren’t making money off it so recourse is zero. At best you can spend a bunch of cash and time to deal with them. The clipart sites are the worst. Thieves! The second worse are the “Tattoo design” sites. They sell or offer free tattoo designs, often to shops. Now there are packs with tattoo “templates” for newer tattooers to use with their digital drawing tools as well that just rip off peoples stuff. At least give the artists credit you fucks. I’d guess there are a good thousand plus of my original tattoo designs out there being used right now with zero artist credits or credited to themselves. That doesn’t even count the hundreds of thousands of “original” designs by new artists who think original means snagging my shit (or someone else) and changing a frigg’n leaf or moving an eyelash and saying “I drew that.” I have even seen my drawings on people as tattoos by people who claimed it as theirs. So annoying. Don’t mistake my annoyance with art thieves as annoyance with people using other peoples art for tattoos. I straight up sold thousands of sets of tattoo flash (designs) to individuals and shops over the years. They were meant for other tattooers to tattoo them on people. I also taught classes at conventions, did seminars, etc. Materials included art. I tattoo all sorts of stuff I didn’t create. I use other peoples art for inspiration pretty often. You can see me talking about this in my post After Munch’s Kiss by the Window for example. Inspiration! I then titled it as is proper. Also we can’t always credit an artist or we don’t need to credit it because of it’s association with other things. Example = A Green Day Bunny tattoo. I do not claim to have created the art. Thieves!
So, that rant came from me seeing some thieving of my stuff I didn’t like in a way I didn’t like, then making the mistake of reverse image searching it to find more foul play I didn’t approve of. While doing this I was supposed to be searching for some pictures of a girls arm and measurments to draw her up some stuff. I saw a pic of some one shot freshie peonies I did around the time I took the other pictures and decided to post a pic. WATERMARKS! ha ha ha… rip this off dip sticks.
Now is where it all gets funny. I start sticking Aarron.com all over this tattoo I did of some peonies.
They are drawn in a style I draw as is obvious if you follow my art blog.
I do almost always reference flowers though. Even ones such as these which I have drawn various renditions of over and over and over.
I cannot for the life of me recall if these are 100% freehanded Bic pen on the arm, or if I made a stencil, or if I drew them up from scratch if I did use a stencil, or what I referenced, or if I referenced … how much???? If I didn’t draw it or cheesed it hard, does that make me guilty of theft as well? No, I don’t think so as we are now looking at a specific illustration style, a common subject matter, and a non statement with no character changes beyond it’s being brought from nature to an illustration. With all that said, I’d assume I just looked up peonies on my phone and from a mix of whatever photos popped up of actual peonies either quick sketched it on paper to the required dimensions and then maybe cleaned it up, or… I googled and did the same thing, but directly on skin with a pen before tattooing.
Pictures of tattoos aren’t sold. They have no monetary worth. Why would they be stolen you may ask yourself. It is because ass-wipes use them to promote themselves by trying to pass off other peoples work as their own. Yes, that is a thing. It is a huge thing. I have even found my own work and work of other people I know in physical portfolios of tattooists and on walls in shops. They usually pic things they would like to do stylistically. They pick pieces that are beyond them, but they aspire to. They rarely pick fancy signature style pieces, but they do that as well. You won’t see many ripping off pics of larger or more unique themes. It is often the most common of themes. Peonies and the like. Usually they are one shot pieces like this one I have posted above. Things that take between an hour up to maybe four-ish hours are normal. People flipping through books don’t pay that close of attention usually, they are just getting a basic judgment. Tattoos of the one shot type are almost always believable as anybody’s. It isn’t questioned. These people who thieve like that are scum. None of them can pull off what they rip off. They are trying to fool clients into thinking they are better than they are. I have in person said “This is mine” on more than one occasion. The response is always some variation of “I didn’t put my name on it, I’m just using it as an example.” If you have a book of tattoo photos and you tattoo, people will assume they are yours. Everyone knows this. It is a total bullshit excuse. The internet has helped slow it down in a way because many just have online portfolios. Easier for people to call bull-pucky. It also has made it worse though as it is easy to snag the images and the people who are thieving aren’t usually the people with eyes on them in general. Grr… Alrighty, ending my long winded rant about art theft and Douch-bag tattooers.
The tattoo above = Quick one shot freshie peonies. Bicep, and poor girl had to suffer some leaves on the inside bend of her arm. Lovely spot that… sensitive and gets agitated quickly. Didn’t have to listen to me rant. She was just playing her tunes. End of story.
Ran into this tattoo picture in a mixed file and have zero clue when I did it, but I do actually remember who it was on. The oddity in that is I remember the person, but not the actual application or when. Suppose it doesn’t matter, but it made me decide to post it.
Besides that, I gotta say I like the tattoo. It is pretty sweet and was a fun surprise to run into.
Taking a bit of traditional drawing, adding in some paint, mixing it up with digital software for some new and crazy fun… A golden fox.
You can get this Golden Fox as a print HERE.
Also cut it up for a T-shirt if you are into that.
Golden fox for luck, prosperity, and joy. Chase the joy!
Random tattoo phone picture because I just had the thought “I have not posted a tattoo in a bit, and I told myself I would. I just dumped last months photos from my phone to the pc, and I scrolled… this was the first tattoo I noticed. Winner winner chicken…. yeah yeah, random is the key.
What I recall with my space cadet artist fried brain here is the person who got this sent me a few skeletons with flowers and wanted the basic idea, but with certain features, plus the butterfly on a finger and I asked if I could do random wildflowers. I basically ripped off the lower section, copied the spine style, re-drew the ribs because I didn’t like the ones I saw because they seemed to dark for a floral piece. I looked up wildflowers, got bored looking for something fresh, and mostly went with my own. I do lots of tiny flower stuff, so no problem.
The client got this on the back of her calf, it was a quick one sitting thing, she sat fine (actually laid on a table because doing the back of a calf isn’t always comfy in a chair) no crazy stories to go with it. I took a pic, went on about life, saw the pic just now and remembered all that.
Body Piercing at Red Region's Luna Gallery
I'm trying to get into being social.
Social media that is.
Let me know you dig my work!
Tweet #aarron
Tell me on Twitter!
I'm now on Instagram too.
and here...
is a larger list of the various social media sites and art realted spaces I am now using regularly, plus a few other places to find me and my work online.
Aarron around the web
Visit them all...
and get sick of me!
