B O T C tattoo

I realised today that I've not posted on here in an age so here's a new thing I'm currently working on. A cheap and cheerful mini zine concerning Belfast, portals and psychogeography 🌀🌀🌀📍📍📍

#tattoozine #belfasttattoo #irelandtattoo #scabwitch #folktattoo #folkart #psychogeography

To oppose trans people's rights and freedoms you break so many social contracts. We keep saying that trans rights are human rights, but conversely, human rights are trans rights, because the second you decide some people don't deserve the same rights and freedoms as others? You start to lose it all.

Rathlin Island, 20/6/25

‘Thugamar fein an samhradh linn’

Summertime, summertime, milk of the calves

We brought the summer with us

Golden summertime of the bright dsies

We brought the summer with us.

Thugamar fein an samhradh linn

Samhradh, samhradh, bainne na ngamhna

Thugamar féin an samhradh linn

Samhradh buí na neoinín glégheal

Thugamar féin an samhradh linn

Portal

#tattoo #tattoos #tattoobelfast

A visit to Cailleach Bhéaras House, Slieve Gullion, Co.Armagh 8/6/25

The highest surviving Burial Cairn in Ireland.

The music is "Whirling, Swirling and Demented" by Ziggurath

#neolithic #bronzeage #megalithic #ireland

Even if you never show it to anyone, at least you'll have engaged in an intensely human act for your own personal amusement, which is time well spent if you ask me. 🖤

If you have an urge to create something, be it music, art, writing, poetry or drawing a cock in the steam on the bus window then please do not hesitate...

You could see this painting as a tiny act of joyful wine-fueled resistance to the approaching tsunami of AI art.
A child's crayon scribbles proudly pinned to a fridge door are better than anything AI will ever produce because they contain, to my mind, the essence of what it means to be human...

Not a good painting by any stretch of the imagination, but shared here to proselytise on behalf of the sheer joy of making marks for the sake of making marks.

The process is the point...

Minninglow Hill

Painted from memory on a brick wall with a mixture of acrylic and masonry paint I found in the shed when I moved into my house, with a brush that I found on the floor... (A thread)

Tattoos and japery at Skullduggery Tatú

A black and white line drawing of a skep, with a large bee positioned in the centre. Beneath are the words "Nothing Without Labour" written in a messy hand drawn old English or Gothic font.

Nothing Without Labour

#bees #medieval #skep #labour #tattoos

And with that, the places we came from are linked and blanketed by ancient memory of oak trees.

One of the many wonderful aspects of this line of work ✌️

"Derwent is derived from Brittonic river name *Deruentiū, Latinised as Deruentiō, meaning "(belonging/pertaining to the) forest of oak trees"; the old river name survived in medieval Welsh poetry, such as Peis Dinogat ("Dinogad's Smock") attached to the larger poem Y Gododdin, as Derwennydd."

"Dair is the Irish name of the seventh letter of the Ogham alphabet, "oak". The Old Irish: dair (Early Old Irish: daur) is related to Welsh derw(en) and to Breton derv(enn). Its Proto-Indo-European root was dóru ("tree"), possibly a deadjectival noun of deru-, drew- ("hard, firm, strong, solid")."

"Derry, is an anglicisation of the Irish Daire or Doire, which translates as 'oak-grove/oak-wood'. The name derives from the settlement's earliest references, Daire Calgaich ('oak-grove of Calgach')"

Fun conversations and enlightening linguistic links between homelands the other day with Lauren-

Black and white photo of a tattoo design. A stylised hawthorn tree in the shape of a crucifix with a shroud hung over the branches

The Church came to the Tree.

Tattoo design inspired by Sacred Trees and Holy Wells.

Available to be tattooed

#tattoo #belfasttattoo #tattoobelfast #folklore #folktattoo

Some available designs.

Some new designs based on the work of Albrecht Dürer, ready to be tattooed.

#tattoo #belfasttattoo #tattoobelfast #dürer

A British pensioner whose bland sandwiches gained him unexpected fame in China has died. Keith Brown, a retired engineer known on Chinese social media as "Old Dry Keith", became a hit when his Chinese wife Zhang Jian began to post videos of him assembling the ham and cheese sandwiches he liked to eat. Chinese observers were grimly fascinated by his dry, boring sandwiches, and his gentle, stoic manner - and he built up a cult following. "We go from questioning the dry old man, to understanding the dry old man, to becoming the dry old man," observed one cultural commentator. "The old man is us, and his dry lunch is our dry life."

just checked the news. there's a bunch of really bad stuff in there

The Merry Dancers

#folk #folktattoo #tattoo #belfasttattoo #tattoobelfast #folklore

"the little bird
that whistled shrill
from the nib of
its yellow bill

a note let go
o’er Belfast Lough—
a blackbird from
a yellow whin"

Ciaran Carson

Maybe she's wearing a homemade bomb vest

And for the laugh, the most stunning paragraph to ever mention Irish snow. James Joyce, The Dead

i see Baby New Year has already violently shit its diaper several times