100 tattoos for conservation
"EXT INKED aims to show that our generation cares about the future of all species and is prepared to prove it in blood, sweat and tears", explain the organisers.
The project is launched today, on Darwin's birthday. "We really feel that Darwin would appreciate our desire to creatively celebrate evolution, the sheer beauty of these species and the human effort needed to save them," a participating artist writes.
EXT INKED is a new art project from Ultimate Holding Company, in conjunction with the Marine Conservation Society and Buglife (The Invertebrate Conservation Trust). Ultimate Holding Company is an award-winning, radical art and design collective operating in the heart of Manchester since 2002.
Volunteers will be permanently tattooed with the image of their chosen mammal, invertebrate, bird, reptile, fish or plant.
To keep EXT INKED free and avoid sponsorship, they are aiming to raise £5,000 from the public. They want the event to be free to attend and hope that it will attract a new wave of interest in conservationism.
With every successful free tattoo the project will create a new ambassador for another threatened species - a living exhibition of Charlie’s other angels!
If you think EXT INKED is a good idea and would like to help then sign up to the newsletter on their website linked below.
"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, are dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us...” -Charles Darwin 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'
