GOYA -Two Men Fighting

Written By jorge cruz

It’s not a reinterpretation or a loose adaptation, I followed the original line for line.

Made for @christopherkieling 

An artist came to me one day — a painter, someone who knows what a drawing carries — and placed a book of Francisco Goya’s work on the table. There was no reinterpretation proposed. No concept to build. No distance between the image and the request. He pointed to a single drawing from Goya’s Album E, also known as the Witches and Old Women Album, and said simply:
“This one. Exactly as it is.”

The drawing was Two Men Fighting, made sometime between 1812 and 1820. Most likely graphite and ink wash. The lines aren’t clean or resolved. They tremble. They hesitate. They press forward and pull back. They feel alive. The figures aren’t heroic or stylized. They’re just there — two men locked together in conflict. No landscape. No background. No indication of who’s right or who will win. There’s no explanation offered, and none is needed.

It feels less like an image imagined than something witnessed.

From the beginning, it was clear that my role wasn’t to interpret. It was to transmit. I didn’t change anything. I followed the drawing line by line, as closely as possible — translating it from paper to skin. Every movement of Goya’s hand became a movement of the machine. Every hesitation mattered. Every uneven pressure carried weight.

For me, that was the satisfaction.

Not inventing something new. Not improving anything. Just holding the line steady enough to let it pass through. No authorship in the loud sense. Just attention. Precision. Respect for the gesture that was already there.

What I love about this piece — both as a drawing and as a tattoo — is that it isn’t conceptual. It doesn’t ask to be decoded. It doesn’t explain itself. It carries its meaning entirely in the action. Two bodies caught in tension. Muscles engaged. Balance unstable. Motion suspended. No commentary. Just urgency. Just force.

And that’s also why Goya matters.

He wasn’t only a court painter or a name frozen in art history. He lived through war, repression, collapse. Spain during those years was tearing itself apart — the Napoleonic invasion, internal conflict, shifting powers, violence that touched every layer of society. Goya moved between worlds. He painted kings, but he walked the streets. He watched soldiers and civilians, crowds and beggars, celebrations and executions. He listened. He observed. And he drew what he saw.

The albums he made — The Disasters of War, Los Caprichos, Album E — were not meant for public display. They weren’t polished statements or official commissions. They were personal responses. Private records. Drawings of street fights, women arguing, men collapsing, children playing, priests shouting, mothers grieving. These weren’t allegories dressed up as morality. They were fragments of reality. Spain as it was: raw, chaotic, exhausted, unresolved.

In that context, Two Men Fighting isn’t just a scene. It’s a kind of truth. A recognition that conflict doesn’t always come with narrative or justification. It appears suddenly. It happens between ordinary people. It doesn’t wait for meaning to be assigned to it.

Goya captured that with a few unstable lines.

Two centuries later, that tension still holds.

Tattooing this image felt honest for that reason. It wasn’t about reimagining or updating it. It was about preserving a moment — carrying it forward, one line at a time. Letting the gesture survive. Letting it stay unsettled.

Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is not to add anything at all.

NOt

References

jorge cruz
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