Many people opt for pure illustration, but if you want script - standalone or alongside an image - you’ll need to figure out what kind of font you want.Īdobe Typekit is a great place to look up font styles, offering everything from handwriting to typewriter. They can use these as inspiration to create a one-of-a-kind piece of your own. Save the images you like most and show them to your artist during your consultation. If, for example, you’ve decided you want to get a tattoo of a cat, a quick #cattattoo search pulls up over 220,000 results. Browsing Instagram is incredibly helpful, as most artists post their work on their own channel and to a hashtag feed. The results are often simple and symbolic.īut you don’t need to be familiar with the lingo to get one of these styles. With a focus on crisp black lines and negative space, this style is about precision. A modernized take on American traditional imagery, this style leans heavily on shading and color to create realistic portraiture. By combining aspects of traditional tattooing and realism, this style is about bold outlines and intense color saturation. The goal of this style is to recreate subjects using shading and color contrast, as they appear in real life. Inspired by traditional Japanese artwork, this style’s clean lines and minimal shading are often used to create tigers, koi fish, and flowers.

Characterized by clean, black outlines and the primary color palette, this style commonly features skulls and roses.

There are a ton of different tattooing styles, and you’ll want to go to an artist who’s skilled in the look you’re after. Once you’ve decided what you want tattooed, you have to figure out how you want it to look. Here’s more on what you should consider when designing your next tattoo: Style

how much time you want to spend with the artist.

how well the colors you want will show up on your skin tone.

how much of your body you want to dedicate to the art.

You can show them any images you’ve saved as inspiration and figure out placement and pricing.ĭepending on the time they have available, the artist may create a mock-up of your tattoo on the spot or a few days later, but ultimately, the final results will depend on several factors: During the consultation, your artist can work out the finer details. It’s important to have your core idea fleshed out before setting up a consultation - unless you’re coming in for lettering, which often only requires you to decide on a font.

Never back down tattoo