tattooed virgin.

I take photos.

This is one from Monte Carlo, Monaco.

I also draw, paint, sketch, design, and like most other impoverished creative people today, I have ceased being a specialist. Currently I am working on luxury yachts doing simple mechanical maintenance and painting engine rooms. This work is frustrating because the scope for expression is so limited.

This is me in a bilge, in a cramped Italian bilge. looking for nuts.

However while working away on these tubs of total debauchery, I also have many projects on the boil at home.

My friends at Kina Ink Tattoo have asked me to do a sketch for their new t shi

rt design. The idea was to create a respectful version of the Madonna (Virgin Mary) in prayer with tattooed arms. This is a challenging and enjoyable task. Being strictly non-religious myself, I have drawn my inspiration from some of the more lovely iconographic and early renaissance images of the Madonna.

Recently when I was visiting Florence I made sure to absorb as much as possib

le of the Uffizi Gallery and one particular image of Mary stuck with this borderline atheist it is Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato's

'Madonna in Sorrow'

Sublimely Baroque, it manages to avoid the bodily awkwardness of the early icons, whilst maintaining a faraway, if not obviously pensive or sorrowful gaze. If I'm honest though, I did overhear some English speaking tourists saying something like, "man, she looks bored!" and I can't help

but feel relief that in today's day and age we are so much more free to express (in progressive societies) an open opinion on religious characters. The artist as well as audience is now free to open dialogue on what would have once been taboo or offensive examples like Mel Gibson's Passion to Jylland Postnan's cartoon's of Mohammed. Poor Giovanni was so limited by the acceptable custom in the 17th century that he could only paint Mary with such an almost impersonally disinterested expression to avoid potential condemnation and prosecution.

Anyway I am grateful for these beautiful celebrations of peoples experience of religion and respectfully I present my version for the local tattoo parlour titled "non sono vergine di tattoo" or "I am Not a Tattoo Virgin":

"non sono vergine di tattoo"

Please don't be offended this is a tribute to two of my favourite things, art and tattoos. let me know what you think...