Alpha Male: A Crying Flower

2026年4月8日

Since I transitioned, I get read as male.

And something unexpected happened: I started seeing how much men suffer too. Not from the outside anymore — from the inside.

The masculinity that gets sold as strength — the alpha male, the dominant one, the one who doesn't feel — is actually one of the most painful traps I've ever witnessed up close. The men who perform it the hardest are often the ones hurting the most. And the ones who can't perform it feel like failures for something that was never real to begin with.

What I've come to believe — what I see more and more clearly — is that the winning masculinity is the sensitive one. The one that can feel. The one that cries. The one that holds a flower instead of crushing it.

So I drew a flower that cries. And I wrote "ALPHA MALE" next to it.

Because that's my alpha male. Tender. Colorful. A little wobbly. Crying openly in red handwriting.

That's the one I want to be.

Where this comes from

It's a bit strange to realize this, but before my transition, almost all the people getting tattooed by me or buying my work were women. A lot of women, a lot of mothers, and very often queer women. My work was probably also more connected to themes like care, softness, maybe even motherhood.

Men were almost completely absent. In my first ten years of tattooing, I can literally count on my fingers how many men I tattooed. And even then, they were always the same kind of people: coming to me for animals, illustrations, something a bit different. Thinking about it now… probably already green flags.

Since my transition, things shifted.

Of course, I now tattoo many trans and queer people, which makes me really happy. But I also started tattooing a lot more cis men, both gay and straight.

And what's interesting is this: they are almost always a very specific type of men.

Not the "alpha male" we are used to seeing everywhere. Not the podcast, Dubai, black-and-grey lion with a compass kind of masculinity.

But men who choose flowers. Men who choose colors. Men who choose softness, weirdness, symbols that don't try to prove anything.

Men who feel like green flags.

And I love that.

So I wanted to make something I could wear too. Something that holds that contradiction.

That's where this "Alpha Male" design comes from: a flower (something I've drawn forever), but instead of a cute face inside, there's this small mustached guy… crying.

Because maybe that's closer to the kind of masculinity I actually see. 🌸