Pt4: A New Hope

The Legend of Zelda series has to be my all time favorite Nintendo franchise. The series has had numerous games produced and although each is basically a remix of the last, they all are great games with an excellent main story and great side quests.

As a young NES gamer, The Legend of Zelda was the epitome of epic. I had played RPG’s on Atari, none that I could recall by name, but there was something memorizing about Zelda. Maybe it was the huge scale of the map, or the awesome music, but Zelda was the crown jewel of my Nintendo collection. How could it not be? The cartridge was gold!

It breaks down like this:
There’s a princess.
She’s kidnapped.
Ganon: Bad Man
You have to save her.
Old guy.
Creepy.
Says its dangerous.
Gives you a sword.
On your way.
Let’s not forget the tri-force.



There are other great Nintendo franchises. Mario, for example, was great, don’t get me wrong, but it was pretty “point A to point B”. Zelda is far less linear, more of a journey than a game. Ill admit, I wasn’t great at it. Many deaths, many attempts. That damn beep when your hearts are down… There was lots of asking my older brother for help, looking at the map and I could never EVER remember how to get through the brown forest on the lower left hand side of the map. I enjoyed collecting all the items, the heart containers as well as the heart container pieces. The music was incredible! Even the little things like when you discover a secret, that sound that plays. Or even when you pick up a new item. As a 7 year old, it was so exciting to be on this epic quest to save the princess and the world. At the same time. Two birds, one stone.

On my last update you saw the outline and the shading got started. It is now finished. And I love it. People talk about regrets, but with this and the SF2 tattoo, how could I ever regret this?



You can see that the excellent shading that was done on the boots continues through the rest of the tattoo. I really love it. It’s definitely a tattoo that could have gone wrong, by choosing the wrong place, wrong picture, or wrong tattooist. There were other choices for a Link tattoo, but when I think of Link this is how I picture him, because when I played Zelda all those years ago, I was young, just like Link here. Because I was young, I thought of Link that way. The fact is Zelda was 8-bit. There was no way to tell if he was old or young by looks alone. I could have gone with an older version for this, more of a Twilight Princess look, a “Harder” look, but I still think this is perfect.