This exercise was a very interesting experience, in that I really did not think or expect it would go the way it did. Tattoos have always been something that have driven me mad with fascination, I actually have one from my 18th birthday (I’m 20 now) that I’ve meaning to add to for a while but never really got to it because of the pandemic. I also studied a lot about the history of tattoos, although even that was a decent while ago, so there are some blurry spots there.

First things first, I started researching “Mom” tattoos and unfortunately did not find the plethora I was expecting to find, considering the subject itself is so broad. Excusing the lack of variety I began to search for more creative options and ideas. Unfortunately, even creativity ages to become unoriginal and obsolete. Although it did serve as a good understanding of what people would ideally go looking for in a mom tattoo idea.

I then began to search for mom metaphors and also thinking about metaphors that could possibly express a child’s relationship with their mother. Taking into account the slightly dark path my mind tends to take with respect to art, the things I came up with had a subtle sense of crudity. But before I got to drawing those out, I decided to go with the bicep area of the arm as my base. My initial thoughts were to go complex, but possible obscurity was a risk.

There were a total of 4 legitimate ideas for this tattoo:
1. A pregnant woman with the silhouette of a baby visible from the womb.
2. The double helical structure of DNA with the word mom on one of a nitrogenous base
3. The “apple of my eye” metaphor taken a little literally.
4. A mother water droplet producing a small, baby droplet.
More than obscure they turned out to be either too irrational in their significance or too literal, or too unneccessary.

As started to sketch one last idea before momentarily giving up on the exercise, something finally started emerge from the lines. After a point everything went from being planned to spontaneous.

It began with me drawing a woman hugging her child. It was a purely logical drawing, frankly speaking. The composition seemed quite interesting, though, so I kept it going further. Around the drawing of the mother hugging her child, I made the outline of the “heart” shape that people instantly go after when they think of a tattoo dedicated to their mothers. I then added to the covered art a slightly dark and dull shade of red, which then almost resembled the colour of muscle tissue from what I’d seen in textbooks while studying anatomy. And seeing as it perfectly fit the shape of the bicep, I decided to add muscle striations just make it a better fit for the region it was created for. Unfortunately, just as I finished it, a blunder of accidental button presses led to me deleting the group for the illustration and closing the document right after while pressing “save”. So what you see above is a better developed version of the other.