Yesterday I met back up with Lyam Sparkes at East River Tattoo to continue working on my right leg with him. My plan is to get a piece done from him each time he’s in town from London. If you remember, he tattooed the goat on my thigh the last time he was in town. This time I had something a little different for Lyam to work with.

Check out nine more photos below.

East River is one of those shops that is constantly changing. Every visit, new objects are placed throughout the space.

Keeping with the nautical theme.

And the classic tattoo shop material.

But this shop is clearly NYC.

The notion of this makes my skin crawl.

Showing you to have a little backbone.

So I came across this imagery a while back and always thought it’d make a great tattoo. It’s a Philosopher’s Stone or ‘The Demonstration of Perfection’, an image from alchemy that represented the duality and perfection of combining Sulphur and Mercury. There’s more to it than that but the moon and sun represent balance. Which is why I felt like this was a solid choice for a tattoo. Everyone needs balance.

Lyam’s way into this kinda stuff and he was stoked to work on it. He’s a fast artist and I think this took around an hour to complete.

The outcome was exactly like the old etching. Once again Lyam delivers a solid tattoo. Here’s a larger photo of the entire piece. He’s in town until Wednesday and is pretty booked but if you want to hit him up for an appointment, you can try calling the shop!