Man, this design is just Mad. There’s no dead space at all in this tattoo. There’s something going on everywhere. The largest areas of nothing are the red parts of the flames. I like the rim-light on the flames. It is high contrast and rich in color. The hat is brilliant too. Again with the rim-light. The big splash with the 13 in it fills the whole top of the hat. There could have been a detail on the hatband. I like the shading on the brim of the hat too. Again, it’s a rim-light.
It’s interesting that the skull has hair, eyebrows, and a mustache. The hair is stylized too. It sticks out from the head in a straight line, strange. I would have thought that being a tattoo, the skull would look mean, but this one looks sleepy, with a cheesy grin. Eyeballs and eyelids along with the red lips make this a strange skull indeed. The goatee is stylized too, being a diamond shape. Again the skull has rim-light shading.
Interesting that some parts of the crossbones are not rim-lit. The ends of them are however and I guess they’re the important bits.
The lettering is amazing. I have never seen a scroll flopped over anything in all my years of looking at tattoos. It’s a wonderful new take on an old icon. Again the scroll is heavily shaded and rim-lit.
It’’s interesting how the flames turn into dripping blood at the bottom. Playing cards are very hard to draw effectively as they don’t offer the artist much to work with in terms of natural opportunities for shading. Here Karl has given each card a boarder, which is something. And then he’s gone for the opposite of a rim-light. I guess you could call that a “fill-light”. It fills the centre area but leaves the edges of the cards in darkness. The club on the Ace of clubs is very wonky, but it works and doesn’t look out of place. When I draw things, I like them to be “correct”, this is often a bad thing.
Most of the tattoo’s background is filled with the spider web. It’s a chunky, fully rendered one, not just lines. I haven’t drawn a spider web before, but it appears that there is a rule to the shading. Each diamond shape is shaded the same way. If you look at it diagonally, one corner is in deep shadow, while the other one is rim-lit.
Flaming dice on each side, fill up some open space. The shading on the dice seems complicated, so I’ll leave it for the moment. Below the spider web is a great pattern of dots and stars. The dots are all uniform in size and there are two different kinds of stars. One star is the traditional five pointer and the other one looks almost like an asterisk.. almost.
The top of the design is crowned with darkly rendered swirls. They don’t seem to be representing anything, like wind or water for example. They just seem to be a nice pattern.
I missed that the skull has a cigarette in a holder. I missed it because in my opinion, it’s too thin, and needs to be chunkier. There is also a lovely plume of smoke rising from the end of the cigarette.
The nose of the skull is a spade. A graphic element in an unexpected place.. nice. The teeth are represented with a simple grid. There has been no attempt made to show different shapes in the teeth or different kinds of teeth. The gap at the front is quirky and a strange inclusion. I like it though. Also a gold tooth to put detail in where it can be fitted.
WOW.. Now that I’ve looked at this design so closely, I REALLY want to do my own version!
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