Here at Grape Ape Tattoo, we have been proud to offer a lot of different ink designs for our visitors.
In past blog posts, we talked about a lot of the themes and creative ideas behind the design of various tattoos.
But technique obviously plays a role, too. So what’s important to a professional tattoo artist and their customer?
Here are some components of what we talk about as we design some of the best tattoos in the Tucson AZ area.
Shading and Lighting
In a very basic sense, when you’re doing the most primitive kind of work, black or colored areas of the tattoo will only feature a certain color tone.
But an advanced technique is to shade or fade the tattoo piece, where the color actually gets less distinct toward the edge of a shape or in some other place. You can talk about this as making the color ‘dimmer’ or ‘milder’.
The effect is that you can have much more of a three-dimensional look to your tattoo!
Lining Color
The line and color combination is also a way to make a tattoo pop.
If you’ve seen some more basic tattoos, you’ve probably seen areas of color without a surrounding blackline. You might have some red or blue blobs connected with spidery lines of black ink. But the refined technique will often feature colored areas with a precise tight black line around each boundary. Think about something like a flower, or even lettering, and you can see this idea at work in what we do.
Integration and Placement
There’s also the concept of tattoo integration. That means having want more than one tattoo that flows into another.
Some people have suffered from having a piecemeal kind of approach to tattoos. They get one somewhere, and then they get one somewhere else. Think about it – if you don’t have a comprehensive plan, are your tattoos going to look complementary to each other?
That’s a big one to think about as you talk to our advanced artists.
What Your Tattoos Mean
Another tip is to look at the meaning, significance and context of a given tattoo.
This might not be exactly in the range of technique, but it’s also part of the tattoo artist’s professional acumen or, you might say, bedside manner (or in this case, chairside manner).
The most extreme example of this is when you have letters in Japanese or Chinese or Korean or some other language, and someone who doesn’t speak those languages is getting ink and they might not know what those symbols mean…
But there are a lot more subtle examples of this, as well, where you can talk about the context of an image and what it means in a certain culture.
In our approach that combines tattoo art with things like film, we are very cerebral about the tattoo art that we provide. We’re excited and passionate about the work, and it shows through in everything that we do. So ask us questions as you come into the shop and look for the best tattoo art you can find!