When all the leaves have fallen

At long last - it's time for me to show off my new tattoo! After 2 sessions, this piece is finally complete.

(Photo courtesy of @vining_tattoos)

This piece has been years in the making -- a tribute to the incomparable group Dead Can Dance, who are among my top 5 absolute favorite bands of all time. I was introduced to them by a friend in the early/mid 1990s, and I've been completely captivated by their music ever since.

Also sometime in the 90s, I found this Dead Can Dance poster at a (now long-gone) gift shop in York, Maine (whose name I can't remember now), along a beach-town strip of tourist-trap spots, tucked in between a fortune-teller's parlor and a pizza place. The shop specialized in hard-to-find rock band & novelty t-shirts, posters, buttons & pins, band patches, postcards, celebrity 8x10 photographs, pipes & bongs ("for tobacco use only"), and other cool miscellaneous stuff. 

That poster stayed plastered to my bedroom wall til I moved to WA state in 2015.

The imagery of the dancing skeletons in the poster/tattoo is from a 1493 woodcut, Danse Macabre ("the dance of death"), by German artist Michael Wolgemut, symbolizing the concept of memento mori, a reminder of death's inevitability. 

For my tattoo, a border of tangled vines and leaves was added to the design to represent the cycle of life, death, and renewal/rebirth, as is visible every day in the changing seasons; a reminder that change is unavoidable, that death is merely a part of that rhythm. We cannot resist change, so we might as well accept it and dance our way through the process.

One of my favorite Dead Can Dance songs, "Severance," addresses the fears we face when confronting these difficult realities, calling upon the season of Autumn as a metaphor for imminent change: 

Severance
The birds of leaving call to us
Yet here we stand endowed with the fear of flight
Over land the winds of change consume the land
While we remain in the shadow of summers now past

When all the leaves have fallen and turned to dust
Will we remain entrenched within our ways?
Indifference, the plague that moves throughout this land
Omen signs in the shapes of things to come

Tomorrow's child is the only child
Tomorrow's child is the only child  

 

I'm very happy with how my tattoo turned out, and I'm grateful to Ariel at Primeval Ink in Olympia, WA for her amazing work and talent!