Watercolor

This style’s signature motif is marked by sketchy, chaotic line work, and washed out coloring that looks as if it were brushed onto the skin (and only sometimes bothering to stay within those lines) giving it that overall painterly quality. Despite this slapdash look, this is an especially time-consuming process. Tattoo needles and paint brushes are rather dissimilar in their uses, and getting one to act like the other proves tricky. What normally takes half a second to be splashed across a canvas with a paint brush in a single stroke, can translate into ten minutes of methodically building up and layering colors to get the same effect on skin. For most tattoo artists who have been trained from day one to embrace perfection, it takes a special breed to be able to step outside of this comfort zone and show us that there is beauty even in chaos.

Suggested Artists: