Creativity Quote by Kerry King

A SLAYER eagle isn’t just a doodle; it’s a flag planted in skin. Kerry King frames his “first figure” like an origin story, the kind metal fans recognize instantly: allegiance before aesthetics. The all-caps “SLAYER” matters here because it points to branding as identity, not marketing. In heavy music, logos function like family crests for people who never felt entitled to one.

Then he swerves into something more revealing: “the dragons and the tribals are all I have got.” On its face it’s a plain inventory of tattoo motifs, the classic late-80s/90s rock visual vocabulary. Underneath, it reads like a shrug at his own iconography: he knows dragons and tribal patterns can scan as generic, even corny, but they’re also the only language available to express a life spent in distortion, speed, and bravado. Those images are shorthand for power, myth, and motion - useful tools when your public self is built from volume and attitude.

The line “all I have got” lands with a quiet, almost accidental melancholy. For someone whose career is spectacle, tattoos become the permanent record when everything else is fleeting: tours end, trends flip, bodies age. King’s not selling you profundity; he’s admitting the bargain. He chose symbols that would last because the self he performs has to last, too. In that sense, the “tribals” aren’t decoration. They’re armor that never comes off.