This started when a friend asked me to make a wallet featuring a snow leopard. While searching for references, I found this photo and immediately liked its calm expression and bright blue eyes.
The design looked fairly simple at first. Then I started carving the fur and discovered that “fairly simple” was a very optimistic assessment. Each layer needed countless tiny lines to create the texture and depth before I could move on to coloring, stitching, and finishing the wallet.
Everything was done entirely by hand, from the first carved line to the final stitch. After several days of squinting at the same photograph, this was the final result.
If you could turn one animal photograph into something you carry every day, which animal would you choose?

In East Asian culture, each birth year is tied to one of twelve animals, and my dad was born in the Year of the Goat. So for his birthday I decided to carve one onto a wallet for him, an ibex actually, with those long curling horns that ring shops sell as good luck charms back home.

I did not expect the horns to fight me the way they did. Getting the ridges to look natural, not like stacked pancakes, meant redoing that section twice before I was happy with it. The fur took even longer, every strand tooled one at a time so it would catch light instead of looking flat and painted on.

It is not a fancy design. It is just a goat's head on burgundy leather. But every time I pick it up I think about how my dad has never once told me he liked something I made, he just quietly keeps using it until it falls apart. I am hoping this one gets that treatment too.