Holy shnapp. Respect for tattoo artists: +100. It's *bleep*ing hard! Which is rather silly of me, thinking it would be easy. lol Live and learn.
Anywho, this is a character's tattoo I designed for his arm.... but now that I look at it, it might've been better for lower back. Ah well. (And the poor character has no name as of yet. Any suggestions would be awesome. )
For the actual tattoo, I played around with some symbolism ideas because he's a leader of a gang, and the tattoo is slightly related to his lifestyle. So I came up with a tweaked form of two crossed rapiers/crosses (the middle part, though it's kind of hard to see now) that stand for death in the armed forces or battle; the heraldic dagger (about the crossed rapiers) also represents death/deceased. The waves on the sides represents strength (okay, so I'm completely BSing that, but oh well. My tattoo. ), as in the fluid strength of water to always find a path or wear something down. There's a lot of ways you can analyze that, actually, so I'll just say they're multi-faceted and complex in their meaning. And I like how they came out, so all's good.
This was really challenging, but I'm really happy with the result. I'll probably end up doing more, lol. Hope you like it!