Love, Life, Pain

I've been working an "old-school" tattoo inspired T-shirt design. It still needs a bit of refining, but I wanted to post what I've been working on.

 The design is meant to show the important aspects of life. Living, love, and pain are intertwined. The dagger is another symbol of our pain and struggle through life, which only makes it that much more worthwhile and beautiful.


  This year has been quite a struggle for myself and my family (between a car accident, legal battles, unexpected work changes, and my grand-mother moving to a home and experiencing dementia), which is why I was inspired to make this T-shirt design.  It might be a very simple design, but it is something that is important to me and has a simplistic and deep message.

 We need to take the struggle, and hard times in as a blessing. We grow from these experiences in life, and we learn more about ourselves in these moments. I find so many of us, myself included, are too afraid to really live, or love. We are afraid to put ourselves out there, and do things in life that seem too challenging, or even unlikely. We are afraid we will fail. Crash and burn. We are afraid of getting hurt. We are afraid of the potential pain. But we need these moments. We need to go through struggles, and even fail sometimes. Through these failures we can learn and make something more. Through our struggles we will grow and learn to love life more. The lows will only compliment the highs.

 Being happy is only meaningful after  experiencing sadness. Life is that much more beautiful along side the struggle. Love is that much more wonderful with the pain. We need to face life, with the pain, and experience it all.