Kanae collaborative Tattoo with Thomas John Bacon

Kanae is a fantastic Tattoo artist from Japan who currently works at The Family Business in London. In the first of what will be an ongoing collaboration between myself and her, Kanae completed work on my backpiece in july 2009 which had taken inspiration from Japanese Sumi-e (ink Brush painting). It depicts bamboo that runs across my back and represents, in essence, a sense of life and growth. Several Asian cultures believe that humanity emerged from a bamboo stem. Japanese folktale tells of a princess from the Moon emerging from a shining bamboo section. And interestingly flowering bamboo is seen as an omen of famine. As my own work centres around concepts of self and existence this collaboration will continue into other pieces that look at the conception of 'being' and the essence of 'life' in its varied forms. The next work will be based around the turmoil of life and its 'struggle' with death and will take the form of a sleeve that we hope to complete by the end of summer 2010.