A coiling blue dragon winds around a bouquet of red roses, drawn as tattoo flash on a piece of cream white poster paper, framed by black brush strokes.
Product description
This Asian Dragon T-shirt captures a moment in which a long body snakes into the picture from the upper left and puts everything around it in order. The head sits high up, the jaws wide open, the teeth exposed, fine whiskers reach to the side and an olive mane lies like a collar around the neck. The base tone of the creature is a deep denim blue, broken up by a screen of fine halftone dots that gives the body a printed, almost poster like surface up close. This opening alone sets the tone for the entire motif.
You can tell from the head that it is meant to hold the first look before the eye moves on. From there the dragon winds downward in calm S curves. Its back carries row upon row of stepped scales, sometimes in blue, sometimes in olive, so the body gains a certain depth despite the clear contour. At half height the clawed paws cross the middle of the image, spread and tensed, as if the creature had only just paused.
Right above this middle a lettering runs across the surface in large stencil letters. "Blaue Drachen" stands there in strong characters, below it slightly smaller "Roten Rosen". The two lines do not form a sentence you would have to finish speaking, but a motto. Blue dragons meet red roses, and the whole surface draws its tension from that encounter. The letters are nibbled at the edges and partly covered by the body of the creature, which locks script and image firmly together.
At the bottom and along the sides red roses open in a stamp style, clearly outlined, with black leaves and thorn branches that lay themselves between the coils of the body. The brick red of the blooms is the warmest signal in the whole image and pulls the eye downward, where creature and vines merge into one another. A few red speckles lie scattered beside them, like traces of the work at a densely hung wall full of collected templates.
Over everything lie bright patches, tears and cracks, as if the sheet had hung in its place for a long time and been touched by many eyes. These traces belong to the print itself, they speak of age without anything really having aged. They take every slickness away from the strong motif and instead give it the character of a well seasoned sheet that seems to have passed through a few hands and still lost none of its force.
The back carries the theme on as a collage. A black dragon winds there between red roses and olive spiral clouds, and the single parts look as if they had been torn from sheets of paper and loosely laid on top of each other. At the lower right a small label closes the scene, it carries the lettering "Blaue Drachen" once more and below it three East Asian characters standing for red roses.
The colors stay muted throughout. Denim blue and olive form the cool frame, the brick red of the roses sets the warm accents, and a cream colored paper ground holds both together. Nothing glares, nothing pushes forward. From a distance the whole thing reads as a strong silhouette of creature, script and blooms, up close it shows the fine dot structure, the broken edges and the many small irregularities in the paper ground. It is precisely this muted triad that makes the image feel like a find and not like loud new goods.
On the body the print works like one single large picture field that keeps the eye moving from top to bottom. The dragon pulls downward, in the middle the lettering holds it, and at the very bottom the roses take it up again. That is exactly where the appeal lies, because the eye gets a clear route and still finds something to do at every station. So there is plenty left to discover without the surface becoming restless, and the motif settles just as calmly with light pants as with dark ones.
Tattoo flash means collected templates, packed close together, hung up for choosing. Exactly this order is what the design picks up, only on a single sheet. If you like tattoo motifs, East Asian imagery and a slightly worn look, you will find a piece here that shows up loud and still stays calm. A piece like that stays in your head for a long time.
