Quick Guide to Tattoo Styles
Also known as Americana, it derives from the sailors’ tattooing tradition. These tattoos have bold black outlines, simple shading work and have a simple color palette. The images are in 2 dimensions and feature symbols, such as eagles, flags, clovers, pin-up girls, sailors, daggers, skulls, roses and dice.
Strongly inspired by graffiti art, cartoons, hip hop, and pop art, this style appeared in the ’70s. Has more complex elements than the old school, such as shading, depth and 3D effects. The tattoos are easily recognized by their vibrant colors, degradês, irreverent themes, and intentional disproportions. Cartoonish looks are frequently present.
Also known as New Traditional, this style generally avoids bright and vibrant colors (present in New School) and focuses on more natural shapes and gradients. It recuperates some of the Old School imagery while incorporating new patriotic imaginarium, such as native americans, portraits, art deco and skulls.
Tribal as a style encompasses several indigenous and primitive tattoo traditions. Indigenous tribes would use symbols as a way to engrave the passing of rituals, to mark social status, to signal group belonging, wartime achievement and for spiritual and ceremonial reasons.
It is also used to refer to the modern tribal tattoos that mimic ancient traditions.
It’s characterised by the sole use of black ink and easy to grasp patterns. Blackwork derives from the Tribal tradition. This development happened as a natural process and the lack of attachment to the ancient traditions allowed individuals to determine their own designs and draw their own meanings.
In practical terms, all tattoos are a set of dots, inked with pigments that, together, create a bigger picture. What makes Dotwork a style of its own is the artist’s ability to harmoniously use dots of different sizes to create sensations of depth, contrast, and continuity.
This is done by coordinating quantity, distance, position and the size of the dots per opposition to the traditional strokes (used to create solid areas or lines).
Focusing solely on the use of black and grey ink, this style became popular during the ’90s and was inspired by post-impressionist techniques such as Pointillism.
In this style, you can have repeating patterns, symmetry, real objects and figures, as long as they follow a pattern. It uses the power of geometry to create a visually appealing whole.
This style isn’t defined by its shapes, symbols or colors, but rather by the feelings transmitted. And to create these feelings, artists generally reduce the shading detail and limit the color gradients. They stick with 2-dimensional drawing and define the boundaries with solid black outlines.
Much like American traditional, you’ll most often find concrete elements (figures, animals, plants). The main difference is that these elements are either a loyal reproduction of an original drawing (from TV, books, fantasy) or are an artwork shaped by the artist’s own style and imagination.
Mimicking hand-drawn features, this style has overlapping lines, incomplete strokes, and elements that do not fully close. The shading work is bold and rough and some parts of the drawing are just negative space. These elements create contrast and contribute to the style’s goal of not being perceived as perfect, but instead a natural process of creation.
Mostly used to depict animals, plants, and landscapes, it easily embeds emotional charge and sensations of movement. Unlike minimalist style, it can depict several objects and present complexity and repetition of lines.
This style is characterized by vivid colors that spread throughout the skin as if ink was spilled on a canvas. The colors can be used alongside a figure structured with black outlines and frequently the color spills over through this main image.
Despite the colors being the main element, it’s the work between shading and contrast that gives this style it’s essence. The way the colors change gradient, flow through space and cross the black outlines, almost as if by mistakes, makes us forget that it was made with a needle and not a brush.
Irezumi is the Japanese word for tattoo and the most popular style deriving from Japanese culture. It was born as a way to erase penal tattoos - markings on the body of criminals that would make them easily recognizable. Originally these tattoos were made by hand, using wooden handles and metal needles attached via silk thread.
This style took off in Japan in 1827 when paintings and woodblock prints from Utagawa Kunioshy, known as the precursor of the manga, became vastly popular. Some of Utagawa’s works featured criminals and outlaws covered in tattoos that spread throughout the back and arms, which increased the popularity of the style among the general public.
Despite being outlawed up until 1948 and being strongly associated with the Yakuza, this style has kept it’s traditional looks. The only major shift is that, unlike traditional Irezumi, the tattoo’s design is now more and more influenced by the clients instead of being left to the artist to choose the composition and design.
This style gives life to characters and memories from manga, cartoons, video games, and animations. They are usually tattooed by fans of the genre who want to materialize their love for certain characters and shows. They preserve nostalgic feelings, childhood memories or impactful moments from the shows such as Dragon ball, Naruto, Death Note, Pokemon or My Neighbour Totoro, to name a few.
Although Anime tattoos can depict Japanese manga, this style should not be confused with the traditional Japanese tattooing style.
Refers to the writing content of any tattoo. Whether using Latin letters, Arabic alphabet, Cyrillic or Kanji, this style is characterized by the communication of written meaning. Therefore, you can see all kinds of numbers, words, and symbols made with virtually all types of fonts.
