When brainstorming ideas for a tattoo design, people are often faced with much difficulty. Often they are overwhelmed with possibilities or are unable to think of a single idea. To get your creative juices flowing, and to fully conceptualize your design, here are
five popular tattoo designs and detailed information about each of them that is helpful when forming initial ideas.
1.) Tribal Tattoos
These are a very popular design, particularly for men and are most commonly found on the bicep, chest, and back. Tribal tattoos are very versatile because of their twisting and dynamic design. Because of this, tribal tattoos can turn out excellently on virtually any part of the body. Also, they are more simplistic than other trendy
tattoo designs because they are almost always done exclusively in black ink or other dark colors, with very little elaboration. Though people usually don't know the meaning behind tribal tattoos, they are often favored because of their symbolic aspects as well. Tribal tattoos offer not only a stylish and appealing design, but also versatility in placement, simplicity in color, and may denote personal significance to those who wears it.
2.) Sleeve Tattoos
This type of tattoo design allows for much more creativity in content and are characterized primarily by placement. Sleeve tattoos may vary in size (full length, three-quarter length, or half length) but are almost always created to twist around the arm so as to appear physically wrapped around the person's body. As mentioned before, the content can be virtually anything and are not limited by color or style of design. Because of this, they are also able to incorporate other types of tattoos such as tribal tattoos, textual tattoos, artistic tattoos, etc. The inherent flexibility of sleeve tattoos makes them a very popular choice among tattoo-lovers; their characteristic placement is the only restriction to consider when creating a sleeve tattoo design.
3.) Symbolic Tattoos
These types of tattoos are most commonly done with Chinese or Japanese characters, astrological signs, Celtic writing, and other prevalent signs such as music notes, stars, peace signs, and hearts. However, symbolism is fundamentally individualistic because a design can be representative of any meaning. If something conveys a message to the wearer, then the universal interpretation is unimportant, which means symbolic tattoos require great forethought by the person who designs it. Placement, size, color, and style are all open for interpretation, so to speak, which means that while symbolic tattoos are perhaps the most creative of tattoo designs, they require a lot of effort to create.
4.) Artistic Tattoos
These can turn out fantastically but unless they are personally designed, are subject to influence by the artistic style of the tattoo artist. This means that the while the design of the tattoo is important, it is essential to take into consideration how a design may appear differently when drawn by different artists. Therefore, when choosing an artist, you should ask for examples of their work to get a better idea of how your particular tattoo will turn out if drawn by that artist. If you draw the tattoo yourself, in order to ensure perfect transportation of the design to your skin, it is important to bring a copy of the tat with the exact size, shape, and color specifications.
5.) Textual Tattoos
Word-based or textual tattoos are made to convey a linguistic message to the wearer or about the wearer to people who see it. Textual tattoos are done in both the native language of the wearer and in other languages that may or may not be related to the person's ethnicity and heritage. But, be cautious when creating a tattoo that is written in another language, because it is easy to make a mistake and drastically alter the meaning of your now permanently inscribed writing. Another consideration, is the way that the text is displayed namely the direction of the text, the shape of the text, font, color, and other style effects (shading, 3-dimensional, glowing, etc.). For ideas, it might be a good idea to look through online font collections or use word-art editors to create the design. The convenient thing about textual tattoos is that if you design them online they are easy and inexpensive to print out and bring into the tattoo artist so he or she can draw it exactly from the printed copy.
