If you ever spend time in a tattoo shop there are three topics that you will hear come up over and over again. Tattoo size, tattoo placement, and can you cover this!

A person may have tattoo dismay because a lot of people fail to give their tattoos proper forethought. Sometimes it’s not even their fault. There are thousands of tattoo artists” out there who lack either the skills or experience to pull off some of the designs that they get asked to ink Some cases the customer dipped their feet in and got it too small realizing that at a distance it looks like a spot. A proper tattoo should have even flow and placement on the body.

Thankfully, there is a solution and it doesn’t have to involve painful and costly laser tattoo removal.

Let me tell you about the Cover-up Tattoo

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

From an impulsive decision that leads us to get a tattoo of something we later regret like an ex’s name, to a fantastic design that was poorly executed, or a badly healed tattoo that became distorted by scar tissue. There are plenty of potential reasons why people can become disenchanted with their tattoos.

Typically, there are two options in this type of situation. You can either resign yourself to living with bad ink or spend thousands of dollars on several painful laser treatment sessions and hope that it is enough to remove a bad tattoo from your body.

Hint: Oftentimes, laser tattoo removal doesn’t work.

However, under the expert hands of a quality artist, there is a third option: this option consists of metamorphosing a crappy design into a more acceptable one by drawing over it.

Cover up Tattoo

The Good Kind Of Cover-Up

The term cover-up tattoo is a bit of a misnomer. When we refer to a cover-up tattoo we do not simply mean that the unwanted tattoo is “covered” with a layer of ink and that’s that. Good cover-up tattoos require a tremendous amount of creativity, ingenuity, years of experience, and more than a bit of meticulousness.

This is so because the best cover-up tattoos do not simply attempt to completely hide the old ink, but rather they seek to incorporate elements into the new design. An experienced tattoo artist can take the basic line framework of the unwanted tattoo and with a strategic and artistic eye, come up with a completely redesigned outline on which to base the new tattoo and impart new meaning.

Like in traditional tattoo art, getting the line work down right is extremely important. A well-executed outline can better define the points of maximum light and shadow and thus create a nuanced contrast map. Achieving this is what separates the wheat from the chaff in the world of tattooing.

It is important to note that cover-up tattoos can only do so much. For example, if the unwanted tattoo is composed of really dark or heavily inked elements, covering it up in a satisfactory manner becomes virtually impossible. Therefore, if your tattoo artist recommends that you undergo a few laser tattoo removal sessions in order to lighten the underlying ink, please heed their warning.

An experienced tattoo artist has likely dealt with similar situations in the past and they are the only ones versed in the methods of obtaining a clean and aesthetically pleasing result.

Another very important thing to keep in mind is that some tattoo artists will simply refuse to work on cover-up tattoos. This is especially true if the skin under the unwanted tattoo has significant scarification. Furthermore, for some artists there is a degree of artistic integrity at play, and “correcting” another fellow artist’s work may be seen as impinging on their creative freedom.

Therefore, choosing the correct artist to do your cover-up tattoo should be based on diligent research.

Below you will find some factors to keep in mind when trying to get a cover-up tattoo.

Cover Up Tattoo

Important Factors To Keep In Mind

When you step into a tattoo parlor and ask for a cover-up tattoo, make sure that your tattoo artist takes a bit of time to inspect and analyze your old ink. There are a few factors that an experienced artist will specifically look for because these can determine, to quite a significant degree, the outcome of your cover-up.

Color: Tattoos that have been done with predominantly black ink cannot be covered up using inks of lighter colors. Meaning that if your unwanted tattoo is black, your new cover-up design will have to be black colored as well. That is not to say that other colors cannot be used as highlights. In fact, all the best tattoo pieces make smart use of lighter colors to accentuate their designs.

Style: Certain styles make covering them up intrinsically difficult because of their specific characteristics. For example, Tribal or Maori style tattoos are difficult to cover up because they are characterized by their reliance on large swathes of dark ink. Japanese designs are also extremely difficult to cover up because they are characterized by intricate and dense linework.

Other styles, such as watercolor type tattoos, are very bad at covering up underlying designs and should thus be discarded when considering what to ink on top of your old tattoo. Generally speaking, the best cover-up results are attained by opting for styles with bold linework and varied textures in order to create a new composition that covers the elements that you no longer want to show.

Size: One of the unwritten rules of cover-up tattoos is that a successful design will take two to three times more space than the underlying ink. This is so because the new design will typically need to cover the old design and require additional work in order to achieve a cohesive new vision. The goal is to subtract attention from the old design and redirect it towards the new one and this is generally achieved by adding new elements that take more space.

Therefore, the bigger your unwanted tattoo the more challenging it will be to cover it up successfully. Keep in mind that some designs are so large that they are virtually impossible to cover up.

Cover Up Tattoo with Roses

Conclusion

Remember this: it’s lazy to draw a solid black shape over an old tattoo and call that a cover-up job. The tattooers job is to take your eyes off of the old design sometimes you’ll have a few lines showing through but that’s ok. your eyes will see the new picture instead of the old one.

Just because you made a mistake in the past does not mean you should repeat it again in the future when choosing an artist to design your cover-up tattoo.

Take your time and do your due diligence. There are thousands of tattoo shops around the country, but only a few are crewed by artist skilled enough to do your new design justice, Above All Tattoo in San Diego is well known for cover up tattoos.