Tattoo Styles

Fine-line tattoos use a single-needle setup to draw delicate, continuous lines — minimal shading, no colour fills, and a precise, drawn-on-paper feel.

Blackwork tattoos use only black ink, often with heavy solid fills and bold geometric or illustrative forms.

Realism tattoos reproduce a photograph or lifelike subject using heavy shading, tonal gradients, and minimal black outlines.

Traditional American tattoos use bold black outlines, a limited saturated colour palette, and iconic subjects — anchors, roses, swallows, hearts — passed down through the Sailor Jerry lineage.

Japanese traditional (irezumi) tattoos cover large body areas with koi, dragons, phoenixes, flowers, and wind-and-water backgrounds, using flat colour and curvilinear composition.

Neo-traditional tattoos extend American traditional with broader colour palettes, richer shading, and modern illustrative subjects while retaining bold outlines.

Geometric tattoos use precise shapes — triangles, circles, polygons, sacred-geometry forms — arranged into symmetric or fractal compositions.

Lettering tattoos render text — scripts, quotes, single words — as the primary subject, in a typeface chosen for meaning and placement.

Illustrative tattoos read like a drawing from a sketchbook or storybook, combining line weight variation, loose shading, and personal subject matter.

Watercolour tattoos mimic the wash-and-bleed of watercolour paint — soft edges, drips, splatters, and colour gradients without hard outlines.

Dotwork tattoos build shading and pattern from thousands of individual dots rather than solid fills or lines, producing a pointillist texture.

Micro-realism tattoos render photorealistic detail at small scales — palm-sized portraits, tiny landscapes, miniature objects — using single-needle precision.

Minimalist tattoos reduce a subject to a few essential lines, often on a small scale, with no shading or colour beyond black.

Tribal tattoos descend from Polynesian, Māori, Marquesan, and other indigenous traditions — bold black linework and solid fills built around symbolic motifs specific to the originating culture.

A soundwave tattoo is a visual representation of an audio waveform — the shape sound makes when rendered as an image, usually a short clip of a voice, a song, or a moment of audio that matters to the wearer.