Posts tagged ‘tattoos’

Having a light olive complexion myself, and an even darker skinned daughter, I’ve given a lot of thought and had some experience with tattooing color on a reasonable variety of skintones. Lately, as my client base has broadened, I have had the opportunity to work an even larger variety and ethnicity of clients and I believe that skintones and skintypes are a topic worth covering here. It is an interesting problem for a couple of reasons.

1st, as the artist, we must take into account that we’re not painting or drawing. Tattoo pigment does not lay on top of the skin like any colored medium you apply to any other surface. Tattoo pigment is injected into the skin, therefor the colors, (even black) are going to be affected by the natural skin pigment.

2nd, and perhaps the bigger problem, is explaining to/convincing the client that has her heart set on colors if/why her color/style choices are unsuitable.

When considering what colors are suitable for a particular skintone the simplest mental formula to use is the darker the skin, the bolder the color. It is impossible to estimate the variety and range of skintones we might be dealing with, so if we use generalities, we will be dealing with:

• Very Light (0% to 10% skin pigment)
• Medium-Light
• Dark-Light
• Light-Medium
• Medium (50% skin pigment)
• Dark-Medium
• Dark
• Dark-Medium
• Dark-Dark (90% to 100% skin pigment)

If that sounds difficult, just imagine 3 shades each of Light, Medium and dark skin. Get it?? Of course there is a wide range in between each of those shades, and I doubt that either 0% or 100% skin pigments exist, but the percentage scale seems the best way to approach the problem. Another way to visualize was suggested to me by a wonderful ad for Mom’s (Millennium) Inks in a recent trade journal. When considering colors to use imagine that the client’s skin is a sheet of tinted semi-transparent plastic in the client’s skintone. Imagine that plastic laying on top of your color choice. How does it look?? crisp and clear; unaffected?? (Lighter skintones) Or dark and muddy; muted?? (Darker skintones)

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Tattoos are permanent.

Ya think? Hehe. I really try to make sure that my ink clients won’t want their tattoo covered up someday simply because the subject matter turns out to be inappropriate. These stylized Forget-Me-Nots are covering up some adolescent pot leaves. Lucky for the client, they were done by a scratcher who thought tattooing was like sketching. He didn’t go too deep or too dark. They’re proving easy to cover up. There are a couple of Bald Eagles below the flowers. One of them has enough decent lines (and it’s important to the client), so I’ll be tuning it up and making it into an eagle to be proud of, while continuing to cover and rework the rest of the tattoo. I’ll keep ya’ll posted as the work progresses.

Peace, out!