It's Tattoo Tuesday time again, and this week's stunning tat comes to us courtesy of a fan of my stand-alone fantasy novel The Thin Executioner, called JAKE.

As I've often stated since it was released almost 13 years ago (April 29th, 2010) The Thin Executioner is my favourite out of all my books. If I had to pulp everything I'd ever written, and could only keep one of them, I'd keep this one. I'm not saying it's my best book -- it's certainly by no means my bestselling or most popular book -- but it's the one that's closest to my heart. So when I see that it's close to the hearts of fans like Jake too, I get an extra warm glow all over. It's nice whenever I'm told that one of my books means a lot to a reader, but even nicer if that book happens to be the one about a thin, callous boy who wants to chop off heads for a living when he grows up, and goes on the adventure of a lifetime that changes him in ways he never could have imagined...

As I said, the book was released in 2010, but it actually started life eight years earlier, in 2002. That's a long time between conception and release, but by no means the longest -- I wrote the first draft of the Darren Dash book for adults that I'm hoping to release later this year more than 20 years ago!!! Like a good wine, sometimes a good book takes time.

If you'd like to read my author notes for The Thin Executioner, in which I talk about how it came to life, and reveal some of its heavier influences, click here: https://darrenshan.com/books/details/the-thin-executioner