Every now and then I manage to talk a small press author into showing us a little skin... tattooed skin, that is. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. Whether it's the influence for their book, influenced by their book, or completely unrelated to the book, we get to hear the story behind their indie ink....
My horror sleeve started with the wolf on my forearm, back when I didn’t know I was going to add anything else afterwards. I’d always wanted a sleeve but for some reason, it didn’t occur to me to plan for one before I started work on my arm. My tattoo artist (Chloe Black – she’s amazing!) lovingly created this wolf for me and then soon afterwards, I told her, “hey, so I want to turn that into part of a sleeve now”. I’m sure tattoo artists just love it when they spend hours drawing, placing, and tattooing a one-off piece just for the client to then tell them they have to retroactively fit it into something else. Still, she was very lovely and accommodating when I told her that I wanted to have a full horror piece, and we started building around it, one image at a time.
The wolf that started it
all is the most personal part of the overall piece.
I’d gone through something and was inspired by song lyrics about inner
strength/the inner wolf, etc. I know it’s cheesy but hey ho – that’s why it’s
there!
The bat came next. Come to think of it, the bat came before I’d decided or
told Chloe that I wanted to develop it all into one big piece. Oh God… I must
have started as a nightmare client for her, now that I think about it, because
she had to try and work a theme in around two disconnected pieces that took up
considerable space.
Lucy (from Francis Ford
Coppola’s version of Dracula) was the first proper
“horror” part of my horror sleeve, and she’s my favourite! I decided to go down
the supernatural route when deciding what I wanted in the sleeve, and vampires
and werewolves seemed like a good way to tie in the wolf and bat that were
already there. Lucy is one of my favourite horror characters ever. She’s my
favourite in the story and I love FFC’s iteration of her. I even got to play
her in a theatre production of Dracula once (though not nearly as well as Sadie
Frost, I regrettably add!) The building next to her is Carfax Abbey. I have
another little Dracula piece on my
wrist – Dracula’s carriage and horses travelling through the mountains. This
was Chloe’s idea and she spent an unbelievable amount of time searching for a
decent picture to go from, and ended up playing and pausing the movie and
taking a screenshot to get it.
At this point, I have to say that deciding the few things I had
space to include from allllll of horror was so difficult! I love so many things
and trying to pick was almost like torture.
An American Werewolf in
London, the poster image was outlined at the same
time as Lucy, and both were filled in and finished later. It’s not only my
favourite werewolf film but it’s also easily in my top 5 favourite films of all
time.
The Exorcist, poster image
was added next. I briefly considered a picture of
Regan’s face first, but she’s too scary, so I went with the iconic poster image
instead. I know Lucy’s a bit scary to some people, but I think she’s pretty.
Regardless, there’s a big difference between a fangy vampire lady and then a
possessed child with an almost green, wounded, evil devil face.
From the devil, it felt only natural to go ahead and fill most of
the remaining space with witches, hence the little The Blair Witch Project inclusion, and both the poster image (just realised, I sure like those poster
images) and Black Phillip, the goat, from The
VVitch. I really love Black Phillip (as does my 4 year-old niece, who told
me my arm is ugly except for the “happy goat”). How I laughed and laughed when
she said that, after crying and dying a bit inside after her cutting comments
about the rest of the artwork that I worked so many hours to afford.
The last piece of the sleeve was the most difficult to decide on
because it was the last spot to fill, and I had about 20 movies that I was
agonising over. John Carpenter’s The
Thing and Ridley Scott’s Alien are
my 2 favourite horror movies of all time, but there were problems with
including either of them. Because the sleeve is in black and grey and was
already so dark, we couldn’t very well stick a xenomorph in there. A xenomorph
deserves to be noticed!
The issue with getting anything from The Thing is that, while the creature design and effects are
spectacular.. it’s just… you know, ugly. I love horror but I didn’t
particularly want something gross tattooed to my arm forever. Besides, using
anything from either of these films would ruin my overall theme, because the
monsters are aliens and fit under sci-fi horror, not supernatural horror.
Just when I thought I wouldn’t be able to ever decide, I thought
back to the start of the process, when I was all focused on vampires and
werewolves, and thought OMG how could I forget about Near Dark. I don’t know why it’s so underrated, but that is a beast
of a vampire movie and so I went with the character of Severen, played by the
late great Bill Paxton.
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Kayleigh Edwards is a writer obsessed with all things horror,
living in the valleys of South Wales, UK. She hopes to one day write herself
out of having to do jobs she hates, which is anything that forces her to leave
her house and her books.
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