Call for Suggestions; Updates

As my regular readers know I've recently started a new category: Body Mod in Pagan Art. I was really excited about it at first as I figured I'd find lots of examples. Well, either I'm not using the right search terms or I'm not into the right artists or something because I'm having a much tougher time of it than I thought I would. So, I'm putting out a call for pagan-themed art that includes body modification. Now, I don't necessarily mean your own personal, original art (although that would be cool too) but professional or really good amateur examples that you find online. This could include paintings, drawings, digital art, photography, etc. I'm not too picky as long as it's got a pagan-y or magical theme, includes body mod of some sort and is of a pretty good quality. So come on folks and share some art with me! To do so just suggest an artist, send a link or image (with the name of the artist of course) to: neopaganink@gmail.com

Thanks in advance!

Also, in recent weeks I've made a concerted effort to include more of the mythological history and folklore behind many of the images featured here on NeoPagan Ink. I hope you noticed and enjoy these bits of background; I would love some feedback about it.

Lastly, I'm sorta kinda considering changing the blog template (that's the background and colors) not because I dislike the current look but because I love tinkering with my blogs. I've only had this blog up and running since July and the current template was installed within weeks of the first post so it hasn't really been that long. Now, so far I haven't found another suitable template but I'm still looking. At any rate, I'd like to know your thoughts about it: should I change the template or stick with it for a while longer? Or are you ready for a new color scheme and background? If so could you recommend a new look or template?

As always, I'm fishing for feedback as I consider this a blog for all neopagan tattoo enthusiasts and not just for me. I've always wanted this to be a resource for anyone of the pagan-y persuasion to see the great art to be found on pagan bodies. With your help and input I hope to continue showcasing great tattoos for a long time to come.

A Moon on a Hip

This is another great tattoo from Kim and this is what she says about it:

The tattoo on my hip is a crescent moon with three raindrops falling from it. I first had this tattoo done ten years ago, but was never completely happy with it. My astrological symbol (Cancer) is nestled inside the crescent. I had it redone by KC at the same time he did my pentagram.

Calling the Storm

This nifty painting was created by artist Jasmine Beckett-Griffith. Be sure to visit her site and gallery to view, and possibly buy, her great gothic, fantasy and fairy art.

Pentagram, Ivy and Dragonfly

This awesome tattoo comes from Kim; she is the 14th person to submit her art to NeoPagan Ink! Yay! This tattoo is her own original design and was inked by KC at Marks of Art out of San Jose, California. Kim had this to say about her tattoo:

The Celtic knotwork pentagram came from a pendant I found online. I’ve seen it used as a tattoo motif on your blog before. I first got the idea of using it as a tattoo six years ago, but didn’t get it inked until November/07. The pendant had flowers around it, but I felt that the vines and berries would work better as a tattoo. To me, they represent growth (the vines) and beginnings (the berries). The dragonfly represents change.

Thanks to Kim for sharing her art!!

Newgrange Spirals

The tattoo image comes from here. I honestly don't remember where the photo of the original Newgrange spirals comes from, sorry 'bout that. Anyway, Newgrange is a fascinating monument in Ireland that is older than Stonehenge by some 500 years. At about 5000 years of age it is older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt. But all that aside, it's an amazing place that I'd dearly love to visit someday (if I ever get rich, that is). On the morning before, of and after the winter solstice the light of the rising sun hits these spirals and other symbols deep within the structure. At no other time of the year does this phenomena occur so we know the ancient builders purposely aligned Newgrange with the solstice. I guess I should have posted this about a week ago but I digress. Pretty cool, eh?

Janus

I found this amazing Janus on BritishInk's Flickrstream. Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and endings, a liminal being of the sowing and harvesting of crops, of birth and death, of youths growing into adults, etc. He is nearly always shown with two faces pointing in opposite directions and is most popularly known for lending his name to our month of January.

Solstice Sun

This tattoo comes from Everything Tattoo and was done at Xtreme Xpressions. Notice the facial tattoos and lip piercings.

Happy Solstice folks!

Winter Sun

This tattoo comes from here. I think this is a fitting sun for the time of year. It's got some dark blue winter colors and a third eye representing the introspection of the season.

Winged Scarab

This gorgeous scarab comes from here. As most of you know, the scarab is a powerful image from Egyptian mythology and is found in many ancient writings and antiquities. This tattoo is apparently based on a scarab found in Pharoah Tutankhamun's tomb, probably the one below. Ra, the sun god, in the form of a scarab, or dung beetle, rolls the sun along his back thus explaining the movements of the sun. The scarab was a very popular symbol for this reason and features on everything from jewelry, including magical amulets, grave goods and furniture.

A lot of the significance of the dung beetle can be traced to the natural behavior of several varieties of beetle. They roll a bit of dung into a perfectly round ball with their young, larvae, inside it. The larvae then feed on the nutrients in the dung and eventually climb out. From the point of view of the ancients a new beetle emerging from a dung ball was a powerful representation of creation and life. Thus they immortalized it in hieroglyphic form with the meaning "to come into being" attached to it.

Body Mod Hecate Painting

I'm starting a new category of blog posts: body mod in pagan art! And this Hecate by Luis Royo is a perfect start, don't ya think? He features body modification in a lot of his amazing work, be sure to check out his site.

Shiny Golden Apple

This nifty tattoo comes from Rate My Ink. "Kallisti", roughly translated, is "for the fairest". See, it goes down like this. There was a big fancy wedding among the Olympians and Eris, goddess of strife, was not invited due to her reputation as a troublemaker. So, for the purpose of stirring up some shit, she plopped this apple in amongst the weddings guests. Now Hera, Athena and Aphrodite naturally think they each deserve the apple and its title and force Paris, prince of Troy to choose. Each goddess offers a different bribe for an outcome of their choosing. Hera offers great political status, Athena offers great military skill and Aphrodite offers him the most beautiful mortal woman, Helen of Sparta. Paris chooses Aphrodite as the fairest, despite the fact that Helen is already married. Eventually, Paris steals Helen away thus dooming his city to be destroyed in the Trojan War.

P.S. I'm doing my own little synchroblog so I invite you to check out my rambling post about Eris at my other blog.

American Indian Woman

I found this tattoo, uncredited, here. Pretty nice, eh? Click for the larger version to see the exquisite details. Notice the designs on her face. Remember the significance of facial tattoos among American Indians?

Zeus, Athena Back Piece

This very nice back piece comes from redandblack.com which is an independent student newspaper out of the University of Georgia. It was created by Radar: Pain & Wonder, Athens and features Zeus at the top left with his thunderbolt. Athena is in the forefront and in the top left are two of her associated animals: the dove and the owl. In ancient times the owl was considered the wisest of birds and if you look closely you can see the dove is holding an olive branch in its beak. The olive was Athena's gift, as opposed to Poseidon's salt water, that created her the patron goddess of Athens. I'm not sure of the significance of the horse. It's not the U. of Georgia mascot as that is UGA the Bulldog. At any rate, be sure to click the image to see the larger version.

Vegvisir

This nifty tattoo comes from Rank My Tattoos and was created at Saint Sabrina's in Minneapolis. For an explanation of this fascinating device I turned to the experts at the International Planetarium Society. Now, pay attention as there will be a quiz later:

This instrument draws on the fact that the sun´s shadow from the tip in the middle of a disk describes different hyperbolas at different times of the year. When you have the hyperbola representing 62° and the four weeks around summer solstice, you don´t have to know the time of the day in order to find the general directions. All you have to do is rotate the disk until the shadow of the tip falls on the hyperbola, and the general directions are given with an accuracy of a few degrees. One of the ingenious things about navigating with this instrument is that if you should choose the wrong gnomon curve and get a course that is a little too much north in the morning, this will be corrected in the afternoon by a slightly south bound course-and your average direction will be correct.

Ya know, I'm such a moron when it comes to numbers and three dimensional thinking that I'm not sure I fully understand the above. But it sure is interesting. And it makes a nice tattoo!


And if this tattoo looks familiar that may be because the fabulous Bjork has this tattoo on her arm.

Cernunnos

This gorgeous Cernunnos comes from Moongrouse which is in another language but features several neopagan tattoos and is well worth a look. Some of my readers may recall a post from September that featured another tattoo version of Cernunnos. I think we can all agree that this latest tattoo is much, much better. Cernunnos is a Celtic fertility god of animals, nature and the Underworld who may have first arisen as a god painted on cave walls dating back to 13,000 BCE. The picture to the right is a detail from the famous Gundestrup Cauldron found in Denmark in 1891. It is made of silver, features several mythological motifs and probably dates from the 1st century BCE.

Horus

I wish I knew the artist who created this amazingly colorful tattoo but I found it, uncredited, on some random MySpace page. Isn't it gorgeous?

Horus is the unlikely son of Isis and Osiris. I say "unlikely" because he was conceived after Set had already killed Osiris. See, it goes like this: Set, being a god of the desert and storms and therefore a bad dude threw a party in which a party game was to see who could fit into a box Set provided. Of course, since it was built to only Osiris' measurements, no one else could fit into it. And the moment Osiris lay down in this coffin Set launched his henchmen on the other guests and threw the coffin into the sea. Now the coffin makes its way into the roots of a tree that eventually completely absorbs it into the trunk. The tree is later felled to form a pillar in the local kings home. Isis discovers this and sets out to get the coffin back. She transforms herself into an old woman and sits near the waters edge. When the servants of the royal family come to the water to do the washing they see the old woman and befriend her. Meanwhile, the queen is looking for a nurse for her infant son and she decides, upon hearing of the old woman, to employ her for this purpose. Okay, now hold on, cuz it's gets even weirder. The old woman agrees to be the baby's boys nurse on one condition: that she be left alone with the infant during the nighttime hours. And the royal couple go along with this. But servants report to the queen the twittering of a bird at night in the child's room and she eventually determines to spy on the old woman. She sees her young son sitting in the fire and a bird flying above him. She, naturally, burst in and snatches her son from the fire. Isis reveals herself and says she was only burning away the child's mortality. Then the kind and queen realize who she is and worship her. They offer her anything she asks and she asks for the wooden pillar with her husband inside it. They agree, the pillar is removed, the roof falls in and Isis is on her way. Later, she conceives Horus (Remember Horus? This is a story about Horus.) while flying above the body of Osiris. Now Horus, as the son of Osiris and Isis, the rulers of the Egyptian pantheon, claims to be the rightful new ruler. But Set says he should be the leader. So, they start a big nasty series of battles until eventually the other gods grow tired of this and decide to hold a council and make a final decision. Osiris, who is now ruler of the Underworld as he is dead, demands the council find in favor of his son, which they do eventually. So we have Horus, the falcon headed one, a solar god of victory, among other things.

As always, be sure to click the image to see the beautiful details.

Ouroboros Pentagram

This nifty tattoo comes from Cosmic Gallery and was created by Jennifer Billig. Historically, the ouroboros represents many things to many people, including the ancient Greeks, alchemists of the Middle Ages as well as neopagans. Here's a snippet of information from Wikipedia:

Carl Jung interpreted the Ouroboros as having an archetypical significance to the human psyche. The Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann writes of it as a representation of the pre-ego "dawn state", depicting the undifferentiated infancy experience of both mankind and the individual child.

Pretty interesting stuff, eh? Personally, I've always wanted an oroboros tattoo since Scully got one on The X-Files, but that's another tail for another time. (Get it? Tail? Eh, nevermind...)

Pentacle and Tools

This nifty tattoo comes from About.com. There's quite a lot going on in this, notice the doll, candle, bell, book and some little blob in the back left that might be a type of mojo bag. This was created by Joe Cutrone - Nightmare Productions, Tuckerton, New Jersey. Very cool.

Venus of Willendorf

I'm just lovin' this tattoo that comes from the Flickrstream of nearsightedharpy. For those of you who don't know the Venus of Willendorf is one of the oldest devotional statues ever found dated to approximately 24,000 BCE - 22,000 BCE. It was found in Willendorf, a village in Austria, in 1908 and measures 4 3/8 inches tall. Given its age it obviously does not represent the goddess Venus as it predates her by several millennia. However this, and a number of other very early goddess statuettes, have been given the title of Venus figurines. The general consensus is that the figures do not represent any specific goddess despite the fact that they all feature very similar attributes such as large busts, overall large body size and full bellies perhaps indicating pregnancy or a well fed individual, or both. I suspect this attitude is only partly due to the fact that there was no written language from the time period (that we know of anyway) to name a goddess. But there is also a tendency to think of the paleolithics as backward folks who didn't travel or share ideas with others thus disallowing the spread of worship of a specific goddess (or god for that matter). Some say the Venus figurines are simply idealized figures of women and that may be true. But, to me, that doesn't preclude the idea that they may indeed be the earliest goddesses.

Isis Tramp Stamp

This nifty, if unfinished, Isis tattoo comes from Beetlejess's photostream and was created by Lisa Starr of Titletown Ink (Green Bay, WI).

Phoenix

This gorgeous phoenix comes from Mez Love's Flickr page.

Buck

This tattoo came from here. This particular image reminds me of something I can't name. Perhaps it's an image from a famous painting and my readers know it?

Burn the Witch: UPDATED: DELETIONS

Okay, I'm just gonna preface this by saying I've been hemming and hawing over this tattoo for months and you might not want to see this. But I think it's important to remember the sufferings of old. Even if they weren't really witches (which most, if not all, weren't) this type of thing really happened. It's disturbing but true to history.

This tattoo comes from Rate My Ink. I'm curious to know what my guests think of this type of tattoo. Is it ok to include here or would you prefer I didn't? You're the boss folks, I just work here. So, let me know what you think.

Edited to UPDATE: I've only had two responses to this, both negative. So, unless I hear different from someone else in the next day or so I'll be removing this post and will not post anything similar in the future.

Edited again to UPDATE: Okay folks, the readers have spoken. Okay, only two spoke but that's enough for me. The image has been removed and I will refrain from posting anything similar in the future. I will, however, leave this post and the link to the original source up if anyone cares to view it.

And while I'm at it: 4 recent posts that contained images from BMEzine have been removed as those folks made it pretty plain they wish to bogart tattoo images. So if you notice a few nice tattoos missing just know you have not lost your mind. They have disappeared and been released back into the blogosphere.

Skull and Daisies

This gorgeous skull with daisies was created by the phenomenal tattoo artist Paul Acker. Be sure to check out his portfolio at Deep Six Laboratory. It's really amazing work if you can stomach all the blood and gore. This skull is relatively tame compared to some of his other work as he seems to specialize in horror images. But still, just wonderful art. This image reminds me of the Jodie Foster film Nell wherein she places daisies in the eye sockets of her dead sister and mother. As always, be sure to click the image to view the details.