tattoo styles explained: a guide to finding yours

"so what style are you thinking?" it's the first question a good artist asks, and it's the one that makes most people freeze. you know what you like when it's in front of you — you just don't have the word for it yet. this is the cheat sheet. and because LA is stacked with talent, i've pointed to a few artists doing each style in a way that actually stuck with me.

one shortcut before we start: open your saved photos. the tattoos you've been quietly screenshotting all have a thread running through them — thin and delicate, bold and graphic, photo-real, illustrative. name that thread and the rest of this gets easy.

fine line

thin, precise, single-needle work — the style LA is probably best known for right now. it lives in delicate florals, small symbols, and script you could mistake for pencil. Samantha Wilks downtown does these dreamy little celestial pieces — a constellation laid out in fine dotted stars with a tiny smiling star tucked in the corner. that's the magic of fine line: it can be barely-there and still have a whole personality. more fine line artists here.

black & grey

shading and gradient with no color — the foundation of realism, portraits, and chicano work, and the style that ages with the most grace. Jian Liang up in highland park tattooed a black & grey reef shark with so much texture in the skin it looks like it's mid-glide under water. if you want depth and drama without a drop of color, this is the lane.

blackwork

bold, high-contrast, all black — anything from heavy ornamental pattern to graphic illustration. it makes a statement and it holds up for decades. Level tattoo in los feliz does something special with it: a stippled renaissance madonna with thin black ivy creeping across her like she's being slowly reclaimed. old-master references, modern execution. see more blackwork.

realism

photo-real detail — portraits, animals, whole scenes rendered like a photograph pressed into skin. it's one of the hardest things to pull off, which is why the people who can really do it stand out fast. imindisoul works at a scale that's almost hard to believe — a full-back saint michael with a gargoyle and a coiling serpent that has the depth of a renaissance painting. browse realism artists.

traditional & neo-traditional

traditional — american traditional — is bold outlines, a tight color palette, and icons that don't age: eagles, roses, daggers, a butterfly in full color across the lower back. neo-traditional keeps those bones but adds richer color and illustrative depth.

two artists make the range obvious. Travis Ross will do a big, saturated traditional butterfly one day and a brooding black & grey viking portrait the next — same hands, totally different gears. Megan Rose goes the bright, characterful route: an electric-blue panther snarling out of a peony, a teary little rainbow clown with stars around its face. her work has a sense of humor, and that's harder to pull off than it looks.

japanese

irezumi — dragons, koi, hannya, peonies and wind bars, composed for the whole body with bold outlines and rich backgrounds. it rewards patience and time in the seat. Shelby Bianco does a soft, elegant take — a cherry-blossom branch in full bloom beside a coiling black & grey dragon — and tyler_whitlock in sherman oaks has sixteen years in the style. see more japanese work.

illustrative & anime

tattoos that read like a page out of a sketchbook — storybook, graphic-novel, or straight-up anime done by someone who actually knows the source. Vince Espinoza covers serious ground: a black & grey ryuk straight out of death note, heavy illustrative serpents, even tiny witty fine-line pieces. real range, real wit. dig into illustrative artists.

linework

pure line, nowhere to hide — no shading to lean on, so every contour has to be confident. katlyyons in mid-city did a gorgeous one up the spine: a moth, a beetle and a bee stacked symmetrically with little dotted stars between them, all in fine black linework. clean, naturalist, and quietly precise. more linework here.

lettering & script

words are their own discipline — the letterforms have to be drawn, spaced and weighted for the part of the body they sit on, and there's nowhere to hide a wobble. LA has a deep bench here because of the city's chicano script tradition. Humilde in mid-wilshire put "LOS ANGELES" across an upper back in loose brushed grey capitals that follow the shoulder line — closer to a paint stroke than a font. see more lettering artists.

and everything else

there's a lot more where that came from — minimalist, geometric, dotwork, ornamental, botanical, surrealism, chicano, and more. the trick is the same for all of them: find the artist whose portfolio is already full of the thing you want.

still circling?

that's normal, and you don't have to figure it out alone. open goodwork, filter by a few of the styles above, and just scroll for a few minutes — you'll feel it click when the right work shows up.

find your style on goodwork →

frequently asked questions