Monsters—not from nightmares
Drew monsters—not from nightmares, but from the strange space between reality and imagination.
I’ve done a handful of small tattoos inspired by Bruegel’s work, and every time I return to him I’m reminded why he still feels so contemporary. If you know Bruegel, you know his world is full of twisted, contorted figures—impossible bodies, grotesque faces, limbs that never quite belong to the torso they’re attached to. At first they look like funny little details, almost decorative, but the more you stay inside his drawings, the more you realize he’s exploring something painfully honest about human nature.
Bruegel is a brutally sharp observer of people. He paints the chaos of society the way it truly is: fragmented, simultaneous, ridiculous and violent. He hides social critique under humour, folklore, and monsters; he uses the grotesque as anthropology, not parody. His demons, peasants, tricksters and twisted bodies become a language through which he talks about fear, greed, stupidity, power, fragility—everything that makes us human and absurd at the same time.
That layered strangeness is what always drew me in. And it’s funny to look back now, especially to the early days when I was still finding my own tattoo language. I wasn’t working with the technical precision I have today, but there was already a fascination with those Bruegelian bodies. One of my early tattoos came from a black-and-white drawing of his: a figure leading a group toward a boat. When I tattooed it, I imagined that leader in red—giving the scene a kind of devilish intensity, part guide, part warning, part seduction.
It’s a small piece, but an important one for me. It reminds me where I started, how much I’ve grown, and why Bruegel’s strange, chaotic universe continues to echo through my own work—whether in charcoal or on skin.
nOT
Bruegel’s work
https://www.wikiart.org/en/pieter-bruegel-the-elder
Bruegel’s complete works at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna:
https://www.khm.at/en/objectdb/?artist=Bruegel,%20Pieter%20der%20%C3%84ltereThe Bruegel family and their artistic legacy (Metropolitan Museum of Art):
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/brue/hd_brue.htmInteractive exploration of The Tower of Babel (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen):
https://collectie.boijmans.nl/en/object/287586The World of Bruegel in Black and White – full print collection (Royal Library of Belgium):
https://belgica.kbr.be/bruegel/
