So, I've done lots of tattoo art, mostly back in HS, but it was all small, black and white designs, kind of typical of the day (early 90s) and my affectation at the time (metal, then grunge) lots of thorny tribal banding and dragons or animals in spiral patterns... and the occasional devil girl. My friend is a huge Marvel fan, and Spidey in particular. He's well inked, as is his wife, and these days, the bigger ink, the better. He decided at New Years that he wanted me to do a tattoo design for him, something simple, reminding of reading comics as a kid. Of course, it had to be Spidey. He wanted it to be large, somewhere between 10 and 24" in span, depending, heh, on his finances, and he wanted what he considered the classic "cool" Spidey of his youth- not the web-slinging, groin-pulling Todd McFarlane style, but something crossed between, as he said, Sal Buscema and me, and not Spidey the superhero, but Spidey the creepy guy on the side of a building looking at you with the bug eyes, more insect than human.

We agreed that it should be simple, and though he wanted color, I felt that adding more blacks than I normally do in my comic work, would best suit the darker, high-contrast image. It will be centered in a (surprisingly) open area on his shoulder, and be something of a focal point, so we wanted it to be striking.

The final size of the piece won't be decided for a few more months, but I'm guessing it's going to be somewhere around 12" in span. Originally, there was a webby background sort of splaying out from the figure, but we decided it would clutter the drawing and distract from the higher contrast of the primary contour around the body against his skin. It's simple, but I think it will be effective!