Feud wrote:While I don't know if it was intended to be such, this actually looks a lot like an American Indian design of a bird (to my untrained eye at least, feel free to correct me if you guys know more on the subject :cough: xander... :cough: ).
What do I look like, a cultural anthropologist? :P
Honestly, my area of interest is the archaeology of the Great Basin. Stone age technology, very mobile, small groups, and almost no petroglyphs or pictographs (pecked stone rock art, and painted rock art, respectively). There is very little regional art from this region, and what there is of it contains mostly anthromorphs, big horned sheep, and bison (there were quite a few bison in the eastern Great Basin a couple of thousand years ago). So, American Indian art is not something that I know a lot about.
That being said, I can tell you that the tattoo does not look like anything Puebloan (Fremont (kind of), Anasazi, Hopi, Sinagua, Zuni, &c.), nor does it look like anything that I have seen in northern California, in the Sierras, or from the Washoe or Shoshone (the Washoe are native to the area around Reno, Carson City, Lake Tahoe, and Pyramid Lake; the Shoshone are all over the Great Basin).
My first impression is that the barbs look a bit Aztec or Meso-American, but my knowledge of those regions is practically nil. The diamond looks vaguely northwestern (i.e. the north west of the US, along the Pacific coast; Washington and the Canadian coast), but, again, my knowledge of the area is so limited that I would not even name the groups.
As Rkiver says, it looks "tribal." I couldn't possibly identify which tribe, but I really like it.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
xander