Made this for my dad’s birthday. His favorite poem is William Butler Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium, and we’ve talked about the idea of making a papercutting based on it before, so I decided to actually make him one. The poem is about old age and time, so I included symbols like day and night, the tree of life, and a clock without hands. Then there are more obvious symbols like the city of Byzantium (I modeled the papercutting on modern-day Istanbul) and the ship. | size: 12×12″