Style guides
Every studio says they do everything. These guides say what each style actually is, how it looks in ten years rather than ten minutes, and what to ask before you sit down. No jargon and nothing dressed up.
Style guide
Delicate, precise, and increasingly the first tattoo people ask for.
Single needles and thin, unbroken lines. The most requested style in Dublin right now, and the one that punishes a bad artist fastest.
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Style guide
Bold lines, a short palette, and a hundred years of proof that it works.
American Traditional. Heavy outlines, flat colour, and a small vocabulary of images built to still read clearly when you are eighty.
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Style guide
Heavy black, hard geometry, and no apology.
Everything from ornamental geometry to solid blackout. Defined by large fields of black ink and an absence of colour.
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Style guide
A photograph rendered on skin, with no outline to lean on.
Portraits and photographic detail built purely from light and shadow. The most technically demanding style, and the least forgiving of an inexperienced artist.
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Style guide
Centuries of rules about how a tattoo should move with the body.
Koi, dragons, peonies and waves, composed to wrap the body as one piece rather than sit on it as a collection.
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Style guide
Traditional's backbone with a much wider palette.
Keeps the bold outline that makes old school last, then adds depth, texture and a far broader range of colour.
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Style guide
Painterly washes and bleeding colour, with a real trade off.
Mimics paint on paper: soft edges, splashes and transparency. Beautiful fresh, and the style that most needs an honest conversation about ageing.
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Style guide
No rules about form, which makes the artist's taste the whole product.
Non-representational composition, brushstroke effects and deliberate distortion. The style where you are buying an artist's judgement, not a design.
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