Styles

American Traditional

Western tattoo style built on thick, well-defined black outlines, a limited palette of bold primary colours and flat colour without gradients, carrying a fixed vocabulary of iconic subjects.

Neo Traditional

Modernisation of American Traditional that keeps bold black outlines but adds multiple line weights, a muted palette, smooth gradients and Art Nouveau / Art Deco decorative language.

Realism

Tattoo rendering that reproduces a photographic or lifelike appearance through tonal value rather than outline. THIS IS THE COLLAPSED NODE required by T11.6-g: the repo's realism-black-gray, realism-full-color, horror-realism, nightmare-realism and photorealistic labels are one style; their palette and subject differences are carried by relationships.csv edges, not by sibling style nodes.

New School

Cartoon-derived tattoo style borrowing American Traditional's thick outlines while adding saturated colour, exaggerated features and deliberate perspective distortion.

Illustrative

Drawing-led tattoo language in which black line and negative space carry the subject's salient features, rather than tonal realism carrying its volume.

Manga

Tattoo style drawing on the visual language of Japanese manga: expressive black-and-white line drawing, symbolic marks and character-led narrative.

Blackwork

Black-ink-only tattoo language built from solid areas, geometric pattern and abstract rhythm, with lighter values obtained by brush shading rather than grey wash.

Geometric

Tattoo style organised by measured construction: clear line, symmetry and compositional precision, with subjects broken down into basic shapes.

Dotwork

Tattoo style that builds pattern and tone from individually placed dots on a planned, measured layout.

Ornamental

Decorative pattern tattooing designed to fit and follow body lines, drawing on a wide and explicitly named set of cultural pattern traditions.

Cybersigilism

Contemporary blackwork language of sharp, fine, spiked linework fusing digital iconography with sigil-like symbolic form.

Fine Line

Tattooing built from thin, precise, clean lines with light shading, suited to small and medium pieces and demanding unusual control.

Minimalist

Tattoo style named after the mid-century art movement, reducing a subject to simple geometric form with expressive gesture removed.

Watercolor

Tattoo style imitating the transparent washes and soft edges of watercolour painting.

Trash Polka

Named style originated by Volker Merschky and Simone Pfaff at the Buena Vista Tattoo Club, Wuerzburg, Germany, from 1998, developed out of physical collage of photographs, cutouts, drawings and newspaper type.

Abstract

Tattoo style named after abstract art: form, colour and mark rather than an accurate depiction of a visible subject.

Sketch

Tattoo style that keeps the marks of an unfinished drawing - construction lines, overshoots and broken contours - as the finished image.

Engraving

Tattoo style drawing on European print engraving: fine lines, hatching and delicate line shading in place of tonal wash. Used as the umbrella term the tattoo trade actually uses.

Woodcut

Tattoo style derived from relief printing: bold cut shapes and coarse directional hatching, the look of a block cut along the grain.

Anatomical Illustration

Tattoo style following the conventions of early modern anatomical illustration: flayed and skeletal figures rendered as if alive and posed, with annotated, engraved detail.

Biomechanical

Tattoo style depicting machinery apparently emerging from the wearer's own flesh - 'bio' plus 'mech' - blending anatomy with circuitry and mechanism.

Surrealism

Tattoo style taking its language from the Surrealist movement founded by Andre Breton in 1924: dream imagery, the uncanny and unexpected juxtaposition.

Psychedelic

Tattoo style taking its language from 1960s psychedelic art: swirling pattern and anti-naturalistic, high-key colour.

Ignorant

Deliberately crude, graffiti-derived tattoo style originating in Paris in the 1990s with the ex-graffiti writer Fuzi Uvtpk, which rejects technical polish as the measure of a tattoo.