Chapter 3 - How to Design Your Own Tattoo

Tattoo designs should be intensely personal and you should be able to design your own tattoo.

I’ve seen women with the names and dates of birth of their kids and firefighters and police officers in New York with the Twin Towers and the names of their fallen comrades.

Your tattoo should mean something to you, if it’s going to sit in a place of honor on your body.

Put some thought into the design, it shouldn’t be a question you ask on Yahoo answers.

Let’s say you’re a woman, and you just want something pretty. So, you pick a rose off of the flash art displayed on the wall in the tattoo artist’s studio. Any one can walk in off the street and pick that same rose. Your best friend, your worst enemy, or heaven forbid, your mother. (And don’t think it hasn’t happened.)

You wouldn’t want to be in the same dress that another woman was wearing to a party, why would you want to wear the same tattoo?

The same principle applies if you’re a man.

Looking at someone else’s tattoo and deciding you want the same tattoo because it looks cool can also be dangerous.

Tattoos can be symbols of group or gang affiliations. Check and double check with your tattooist for any hidden meanings before you have your tattoo done. Tattoos can denote affiliation with a specific branch of the military, white supremacy groups, or prison experience.

Also, if you choose an Asian symbol, find out the meaning first. You don’t want to walk out of a tattoo studio with, let’s say, the symbol that means transvestite in Japanese. Unless you are, and you’re advertising. Check with someone
who is a native speaker of  language

How to design your own tattoo – especially if you know nothing about art.

Decide basically what you want.

Let’s use the woman and the rose analogy again.

You still want a rose tattoo. There are thousands of varieties of roses. Buy a horticulture magazine or get on line and search for roses. There are old roses, tea roses, and long stemmed roses, there are color variations and petal shape variations.

I would look a minimum of 25 different roses in various categories and print out or copy what you finally decide on.

Now, do you want a single rose, or a cluster of roses?

Should the rose be a bud? Half opened? Fully opened? Should a single petal be falling off?

What color should the rose be? Should it be more than one color?

What about thorns? No thorns, a few thorns, a lot of thorns? Should the thorns appear to pierce your skin and show a drop of blood? Should the blood be red? How many drops?

Should the rose have leaves? One stem branching off with a lot of leaves. Leaves branching directly off the rose stem? One leaf?

Let’s say you’re a man and you want a lion tattoo.

Is the lion laying down? Is it laying down on a rock? Is it laying down in grass ready to pounce?

Is the lion standing? What is it standing on? Are there other lions around it?

Is it in the process of roaring? Eating? Running?

Is it looking over its shoulder?

Do you want the full body or just the face of the lion?

Once you make up your mind and have a more specific idea of what you want and copies of the pictures you got your ideas from, go to as many tattoo studios as you can.

Look at the albums tattoo artists have of their actual work, not the flash art on the wall. Be aware that most pictures are taken immediately after the tattoos are done. From the actual photographs of tattoos, did you find an artist who can render the kind of artwork that you want?

A good tattoo artist will be able to translate your ideas into the tattoo body art that you want.

Even if you are an artist or a graphic designer, the tattoo artist will redraw your work. Remember tattoos are on flesh. Not on paper. There will be limitations that you are not familiar with, that the tattoo artist must take into consideration.
 
Part 2 of Chapter 3 - How to Design Your Own Tattoo, has commonly used symbols and their meanings