Tattoo Styles
Every tattoo style our 1,300+ artists work in, ranked by how common it is.
Blackwork
387 artists
Blackwork tattoos use only black ink, often with heavy solid fills and bold geometric or illustrative forms.
Realism
366 artists
Realism tattoos reproduce a photograph or lifelike subject using heavy shading, tonal gradients, and minimal black outlines.
Traditional (American)
188 artists
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 (Irezumi)
83 artists
Japanese traditional (irezumi) tattoos cover large body areas with koi, dragons, phoenixes, flowers, and wind-and-water backgrounds, using flat colour and curvilinear composition.
Geometric
80 artists
Geometric tattoos use precise shapes — triangles, circles, polygons, sacred-geometry forms — arranged into symmetric or fractal compositions.
Illustrative
51 artists
Illustrative tattoos read like a drawing from a sketchbook or storybook, combining line weight variation, loose shading, and personal subject matter.
Lettering
48 artists
Lettering tattoos render text — scripts, quotes, single words — as the primary subject, in a typeface chosen for meaning and placement.
Dotwork
39 artists
Dotwork tattoos build shading and pattern from thousands of individual dots rather than solid fills or lines, producing a pointillist texture.
Neo-traditional
36 artists
Neo-traditional tattoos extend American traditional with broader colour palettes, richer shading, and modern illustrative subjects while retaining bold outlines.
Minimalist
20 artists
Minimalist tattoos reduce a subject to a few essential lines, often on a small scale, with no shading or colour beyond black.
Tribal
12 artists
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.
Micro-realism
9 artists
Micro-realism tattoos render photorealistic detail at small scales — palm-sized portraits, tiny landscapes, miniature objects — using single-needle precision.
Soundwave
3 artists
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.