Courtney Love x Parliament Tattoo Charity Auction

Traditionally a fine artist, Kat Jennings, recognisable under her pseudonym Knife Dance, studied at Central Saint Martins before turning her hand to tattooing in the last year after a lifelong fascination and to meet an ongoing demand.

Originally from West Yorkshire but now London based, Knife Dance has been an established creative for several years offering commission work, prints, apparel and thanks to Parliament Tattoo, now holding the skill to transfer a design from paper to skin in both fine line and black work.

Inspired by the timeless and often macabre works of Harry Clarke and Aubrey Beardsley, Knife Dance treads the line between hand drawn artist and tattooist. With additional traditional Japanese, religious and medieval influences, Knife Dance firmly believes in the slowed pace and serenity of the act of storytelling through image.

"I am, I am," she says

"I am not free," she says

"Help me, I am withering

Withering, withering, withering"

Hang on, you'll get your soul

It's a soul

Taking inspiration from the lyrics of ‘Baby Doll’, specifically the lyrics above and alongside Courtney Love’s voice and the instrumental to match, an eerie scene is created. I envisioned a body slowly losing grip on its existence and its soul slowly fading away into the background. I imagined the body decaying into nature but sucking up the energy of everything around it and decomposing the lilies with it. Everything that was beautiful is now ugly and even though the body is now a skeleton, whatever tries to live around it still can’t grow into beauty because the body strangles life.

The choice of lilies in this piece (traditionally a popular floral choice for funerals) represents what could have existed and the contradiction that the use of lilies restore innocence to the soul of the departed. Traditionally, the use of red and pinks stand for admiration and remembrance but ironically in this case, once the outer shell of the body has been stripped away, the toxicity is true to form.