Realistic tattoos are hard to get perfectly right and it takes a skilled tattoo artist or tattoo designer to create a realistic-looking artwork with amazing visual impact. Whether colorful or in black and white, this is a classic tattoo style that is ideal if there’s something very specific you want to portray. Realistic tattoos can portray anything from scenery or objects to animals and people. Recently popularized for DIY tattoo-ers, in the hands of a professional this art can go to beautiful levels, characterized by thick and bold lines most often in simple black with small decorative patterns. Stick and poke tattooĪrtist Slowerblack shows off the possibilities of the stick-n-poke, where the artist uses a single needle to create simple designs. Without the black outlines of some of the more classic styles, artists are able to achieve eerily accurate renditions of people both in color and black and grey. Shane O’Neill shows us how realistic you can get with tattoos with his portraiture, a sub-set of the realism genre (which is just like it sounds-realistic renderings of imagery).

Black and grey images aren’t as limited by subject matter, depicting anything and everything realistically in shades of grey, originally done by watering down black ink to create a spectrum of shades. Jessica Mascitti of LA’s East Side Tattoo shows us great examples of different kinds of work in a genre that can encompass a wide range of styles. Here, Chris O’Donnell of New York shows off the traditional animal, floral, and samurai imagery of this style. And it’s a genre particularly known for large images that cover the back, arms, and legs. Tattoo artists still create both traditional and new takes on these classic masterpieces. One that has maintained it’s popularity is the Japanese style Irezumi. Japanese tattoo styleĪs we showed you in a previous post, there are centuries of history for the art tattooing all over the world. Jesse Smith‘s work is famous in this category, depicting fabulous imagined worlds full of chaos and very often chariactured animals in vivid color. New School tattoos are like a crazy comic book on your body. The tattoo style was popularized by Norman “Sailor Jerry” Collins in the 1930s, but is a consistent choice today-shown here by Frankie Caraccioli of Kings Avenue Tattoo. They’re closely tied to the ocean and nautical imagery, pinup female figures, fierce predatory animals, or combinations of hearts, roses, and daggers. These may be the first kind of tattoo you think of, an old-school style defined by bold outlines and the use of similar colors and imagery. Here are the 12 most popular, classic tattoo styles: 1.

Figuring out how exactly you want your perfect tattoo to look like is hard, but we hope the styles below will help you narrow it down. If you’re looking for the perfect tattoo style, you may not be able to use the exact terminology of what you want, but in all likelihood you’ll have one of these in mind already. Here are twelve of the classic styles of tattoo art, the ones you definitely want to know before you start getting into tattoo design. But a lot of those designs are adapted from certain historically popular tattoo styles-many of them decades or even centuries old.

There are probably thousands of styles of tattoos around now, with talented artists creating their own every day.

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