Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Drew monsters—not from nightmares, but from the strange space between reality and imagination.
His figures twist and contort with impossible bodies, grotesque faces, and limbs that don’t quite belong. At first, they seem like strange decorations. But look longer, and they start to feel uncomfortably familiar—like he was sketching some hidden truth about human nature. Bruegel wasn’t just a painter of peasants and landscapes. He was a sharp observer of society. Beneath the humor and chaos in his work is a deep moral vision—satire, critique, and a fascination with the absurdity of human behavior. His monsters often came from folklore, superstition, and myth, but he used them to talk about fear, greed, temptation, and the grotesque side of everyday life.
It’s that layered strangeness that drew me in. Certain details from his drawings have stayed with me, and one of them became this tattoo. It portrays a red figure leading a group of people into a boat—an urgent, almost forced departure. I chose to render the figure in red, giving it a malefic, devil-like presence. It feels like a guide and a warning at once. The truth is, I completely forgot which exact drawing I took this image from. But somehow, that feels appropriate—like the figure surfaced from the chaos of his work and demanded to exist on its own.
I made this tattoo in Lisbon, at Flourish Studio—a place that no longer exists physically, but lives on in the work we created there.
“Pieter Bruegel the Elder” – tattoo detail for @afonso_serro_official
@flourishandblotts.studio • Lisbon
Explore more of Bruegel’s work here: https://www.wikiart.org/en/pieter-bruegel-the-elder
Jorge
