Colt.Ink

I DON'T KNOW IF YOU'VE TRIED IT -->
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But leadership is really really hard.

If you have any experience in the corporate world, then you've seen a lot of bad leadership. This is probably true everywhere, but the office is my experience so that's what I can talk about.

A lot of the time, people get called up because they excel at something high-visability like sales, only to find out that a great hunter does not necessarily make a great chief, chief. Not everyone is cut out for leadership. So it goes.

It wasn't until I started a business of my own that I learned why that is. Basically, to be brief, it's because leadership means everybody is mad at you constantly. It sucks. You're the end of the line, the fine tooth comb that checks every detail and solves for every answer, the maker of hard decisions. Consequently, any failure is always going to be on you, even if it's not. To wit; the buck stops here.

To be even more concise: it's a servant job. Bottom of the totem pole.

Fun fact, because this is MY caption and I'll interrupt me whenever I WANT, OK? The bottom of the totem pole is the place of highest honor. It's the base, the part that everything else is built on. It's also the most visible from the ground, so, typically, a master carver would take that level unto himself to make sure it's a credit to the craft, letting apprentices work out on the totems 15ft up where there's room for error.

You, my leadership-curious friend, will fail if you can't wrap your thinksponge around this idea. Low tolerance for other people's bu****it? Ready and willing to rage-quit when you can't win? Are you given to self-pity and anger? Don't do it, you're not ready. can tell you as much if you don't believe me.

I invite you to watch any movie or read any book about a great leader. Whether it be sports, war, culture, or politics, you'll find that they have nothing in common, except what they lack: self-pity. No great leader is known as the "great bi***er", "the whinger of England", "the first sadsack of America", "the incredibly bad loser of Rome".

Leadership IS sacrifice for the greater good. It's the plumbing of deep waters, it's peace in risk.

MURDERER'S ROW ->
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I'm not entirely sure I should title one of my weird Instagram essays that way, but it's important to me that I signal how hardcore this giraffe is. Honestly, if it triggers Instagram's censorship algorithm, neither me nor this retro-futuristic cyber giraffe cares. That's how gangster this TRON-world sky camel really is. It doesn't even THINK about Instagram or what its stupid algorithm says. It's too busy out on the post-apocalyptic streets of some neon lit technopolis to even worry about that noise.

Don't let its gentle eyelashes and delicious looking leaf graphic fool you, this giraffe is a stone cold roughneck. It will hack into your bitcoin wallet and sell it all for a stack of leaf graphics it could eat in a day. Who cares? There's always more code to bend and bitcoins to hack.

Honestly, if you're looking for a super tough tattoo that in no way celebrates the winsome glory of peaceful herbivorous life, you couldn't do better than this scumbag giraffe. This giraffe is a degenerate and a violent product of a cold future where it's hack be hacked, munch or be munched, and this tattoo is basically a wanted poster for skin. If you're looking for a tattoo that really strikes fear into the hearts of your enemies, you need to message me right now and book for maybe next thursday at 2pm.

DEEPLY INDEBTED ->
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To every one of you that inexplicably remembers to bring an industrial grade paint pen with you everywhere just in case you end up in a shiddy punk rock dive bar bathroom at the end of the night. I'm in awe every time I search between rude drawings for a spot on the cracked plastic mirror to check for lettuce between my teeth. I can't keep track of which pocket I last stuffed my wallet into. I straight up just stopped wearing my glasses for like a year until I figured out I can leave them by the door with my keys so I find them in the morning. I can't imagine having the perspicacity required to not only keep that thang on you, but also not let it explode in your pocket.

I salute you, whoever you are, for having so much to say but only four walls and a highly abused crapper to listen, because it really has inspired me artistically. The energy of a properly disrespected shame closet is something uniquely human, alive, and organic. It's true culture.

While I do enjoy taking what I find in permanent honeybuckets and putting it into my art, I find some people have a hard time visualizing it on skin. To help resolve this issue, I've created some mockups to show how interesting this style of tattoo can be with the right placement and layout. It's interesting and detailed, if abstract, up close and quite striking from far away.

The way I've been creating my lineshaded subjects reflects the same sort of visual double-life. From far away, the image is very scannable but, close up, it looks graphical and abstract.

If you use bathrooms, I think you should really consider messaging me right now to book a piece in this style. I would love to tattoo this retro-futuristic cyber elephant or a piece like it, and I am willing to go to almost any bathroom in the Northwest in order to do, no matter how terrifying.

You can find me here, at Esoteric Tattoo on N Killingsworth, Portland OR, and probably at that one bar your friends never want to go to but it's cheap and the bartender finally saved up enough for a new glass eye so it's less upsetting to order there now.