"Eternal Guardian" by Nikki van de Pol

This picture was designed for a good friend as a tattoo for his back. He asked for a Wyverex dragon combined with a celtic cross and I was more or less free to fill in the details myself. It's also partly made in memory of his father, who died on the date the tombstone shows. Therefore of course it's a very personal piece, made for him alone, and no one else will be permitted to have this tattooed or used in any other way, but I'm sure you all understand that.

As for the picture itself, I tried to make it as detailed as possible and went for a kind of mixed possessive /protective look on the dragon. Even though the two pieces of celtic knotwork in here are quite small, they truly gave me hell, I get confused so easily while doing these things!!!! But probably that's just my lack of concentration skills :P or my being too lazy to consult tutorials :P Both inscriptions on the cross are Latin. The first reads in full 'sit tibi terra levis': May the earth be soft for you, which is a traditional Roman epitaph, the longer text I took from that friend's nickname on MSN since I felt it had to be something personal and I then translated it myself into Latin. It reads: Dum in stellas elabor, mihi nova datur facultas, mentis elevandae, obscurandique curas which translates into: Drifting away in the stars, another chance to clear my mind, forget about my sorrows. This text originally was done in pencil as well, just like the smaller one, but my scanner turned it into something pretty illegible so that's why I replaced it with a computer version. Also if the outlines of the figure look a bit weird, It's because I had to clean up the paper digitally since it looked terribly smudgy when scanned and I doubted the moderators would be very pleased with that, but since the resolution of the scan wasn't that high it creates a bit of a strange effect in some places.

It was made between June and August 2008. I hope you all like it!