Painterly Tattoos 101

Thank you so much for your interest in working with me to get a painterly tattoo!

Before we begin, there are a few essential things for all clients to note before committing to a painterly tattoo with me.

If you're interested in a design from my wanna do's page/available designs, you can only read points 1 through 3. If you'd like to bring in your own painting as reference that I have not listed and edited/cropped, please read points 1 through 6!

This is an apprentice tattoo

I have over one year of experience tattooing on skin, and I will need another year before I complete my apprenticeship and am a fully fledged artist.

This has the benefit of cheaper prices, as I still need the practice, and am still exploring different styles! However, it does come with more risks than going to an artist who specializes in one style, and has done that style for many years.

My work on fake skin and real skin both speak to what I am capable of, but I'm far from perfect and still learning! And of course, always grateful for the people willing to take a chance on me. :)

2. Painterly tattoos are closer to masterstudies than exact copies

Color on different skin tones will always look different from color on a canvas or screen, as we see the inks through the filter of our melanin (skin color) that sits on the first layer of skin (the epidermis).

We also are reacreating a piece in a very limited amount of time, as we are dealing with a canvas that swells and reacts to ink being applied. People who specialize in making accurate recreations of paintings do tend to struggle to recreate every brushstroke one for one, and they tend to have time and the use of the same medium on their side. The original artist could have taken weeks if not months to finish the painting we're referencing, and since we're recreating it in a different medium and in a much more limited timespan, it will never quite be one for one.

My goal is to get the overall value structure, the feel of the colors, and the general "vibe" of it moreso than matching 1:1. While I do still reference very closely and many people would consider it an accurate recreation, I am also translating and editing to make sure it looks good as a tattoo, and will age well as one too.

A J. C. Leyendecker masterstudy by Kate Lamoure

3. I would require a commitment of 2-4 visits depending on size, including a visit for healed photos

The 3-4 visit estimate (including 2-3 sessions for tattooing, and a final visit for healed photos) would be more likely for larger pieces. But even if we do a smaller piece that I can start and finish in a day, I would like for clients to return once it is healed for photos, videos, and assessing from my mentor on what I can do to keep getting better.

Usually the photo session for healed photos and videos would be somewhere between 2-4 weeks after your last session!

I also please ask that you read all aftercare instructions, and protect your tattoo from sun exposure, dirty environments, and submerged water. Proper care in these first weeks will help your tattoo look amazing for many years to come!

4. References need to consider size

If you visit my page of wanna dos/available designs, I have already taken these factors into consideration! This would only apply if you wish to bring in your own reference.

When it comes to references with faces in them, faces would need to be usually a minimum of 2in for them to be applied properly, and age well. While we can infinitely zoom in and out digitally, when we're doing a master copy of something with any kind of traditional medium, we have a size limit when it comes to our tools. Even a single needle still has a certain width to it.

Tattoos are also one of the only mediums that changes, and loses detail and contrast with age (at least compared to other mediums). It's on a living canvas, which means we have to give details some amount of size to help them stay legible, even as it inevitably changes over time.

The Rescue by John William Waterhouse (1890)

This is a beautiful and impactful piece. But the faces of the figures are so far from the focus (the bouquet of flowers that fell to the river), that with the 2in minimum for faces, this piece would need to be massive to translate well into a tattoo! This likely was done on a large canvas, and so this would really only be viable in my professional opinion as a backpiece. (And by viable, I mean something that could age gracefully, and look good now and in 5 years' time.)

Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus by John William Waterhouse

This is also a beautiful painting, but the head they're beholding on the river (Orpheus' head) is such an essential part of the storytelling here. So unless this was cropped to one of the nymph's faces where we would be sacrificing the overall storytelling of this piece for the appreciation of his skill alone, this would also only be viable as a headpiece if we wanted this to age gracefully and maintain the impressive level of detail Waterhouse has put into this painting.

While technique is a large part of what makes tattoos age well, part of why the ink "blurs" with many, many years is because the macrophages that hold it (part of our immune system that chooses to quarantine the foreign object it cannot break down) eventually die out as cells, usually within a few months to a couple of years. The ink is then "free floating" until another macrophage finds it, discovers it cannot break down the foreign object, and decides to hold it in place to "quarantine" it again. Technique is still important, however, no amount of skill from a tattoo artist can change how our immune system works on a fundamental level.

This means that, for example, full bodies might require a lot of real estate to be applied properly. And paintings with multiple figures or paintings where the figures are distant from their focus, like the examples above, might either not be possible or require a large area (like a full sleeve or back) to be done properly. Portraits that are cropped to the face or paintings that are cropped to a detail area (like hands, or a portion of the expression) are much more likely to be successful in terms of being translated into a tattoo!

An example of a 7 month healed tattoo that was not given appropriate size for details to age in the best way possible. If this is how much it has visibly aged at 7mo because of the size, imagine how it will look like 5 years down the line, or 10, 20, 30.

On the left, we have an example of a 2 year healed tattoo by Deanna James that was given appropriate size for details to age well.

5. References need to consider contrast

An example of a 3mo old tattoo, and what can happen when an initial reference doesn't have enough contrast. This is also a good example of the concept of how tattoos lose contrast with time, and why they need a lot of contrast to age well.

On the left, we see healed work by Rich Harris that is a wonderful example of how painterly tattoos can age wonderfully when we use high contrast and a large enough size.

If you visit my page of wanna dos/available designs, I have already taken these factors into consideration! This would only apply if you wish to bring in your own reference.

As we discussed in the point above, tattoos are one of the only mediums that changes significantly on the canvas it's applied to within 10, 20, 40 years. And even after the first month of healing, tattoos will always lose contrast compared to their digital reference and will lose contrast over time. For this reason, it's important for us to start with a high contrast reference so it stays legible even with the aging process.

We'll always get brighter highlights using light than using any kind of ink (the lights of your computer or phone screen), and the skin tone itself is usually close to the lightest tone we'll get. With the darkest extreme of blacks and colors of a similar value, they are inserted into the second layer of skin (the dermis), and will always be seen through the filter of our melanin (our skin color) that sits on the first layer of skin (the epidermis). So healed tattoos will never have true 100% black. The same thing happens to whites, and when considering the extra factor that they're not fully opaque, we tend to not really be able to go too much lighter than the value of the skin itself.

Let's look at some examples of good references, not so great references, and what we can do to help translate paintings into tattoos:

St. Catherine, Italian school (1606) ✅

This is a great example of high contrast! The figure has very light tones and very dark tones, and it creates very sharp edges (even if they're not defined with lines, but with the light vs dark) that will age very well.

The Soul of the Rose by John William Waterhouse (1908) ✅

This is an edited version of the painting, and there are many edits of this as it can be hard to match a photograph to what we see exactly. But in this specific edited version, the amount of contrast is great. Even if we squint and even if these values were to lose some contrast over time, it would still be generally clear what this is and what's happening.

Cropped version of Ophelia by Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1890) 🛑

This is a beautiful piece, but it would not translate well into a tattoo as is.

While there is contrast between the figure and the background, the very light, pastel tones of the hair, white dress and skin means there aren't really any dark shadows or tones to differentiate them well. While there's a jump of maybe 2-3 value shifts on the 10 value scale, when this loses contrast with age, it could get muddy and hard to read.

The muses Urania and Calliope by Simon Vouet (1634)

Can paintings be edited to add contrast?

In most cases, yes!

Let's say, for example, that we wanted to take Calliope from the painting above. As we can see below that image, the image on its own in that area has medium to low contrast. And we need very high contrast for tattoos to age well. But with the edit to the right of it, we can bump up the contrast digitally so that this becomes a more viable option for a tattoo! This is also a perhaps slightly exaggerated example, but it's just to show how much can be done digitally.

I will likely slightly bump contrast for most references anyway, and you will always see the version I create with applied edits that we will use as our reference before we begin.

6. References need to consider the artist

If you visit my page of wanna dos/available designs, I have already taken these factors into consideration! This would only apply if you wish to bring in your own reference.

Generally, works published after 1978 have their copyright expire 70 years after the death of the author. Works published before that tend to vary depending on circumstance. However, to be safe, 70 years from the time of the writing of this article (January 2025) would mean that a painter would have had to pass in 1955 for us to be usually in the clear with using their work as a direct reference. Most of the works I like to reference are done far before that anyways.

While there are still oil painters and digital painters today who imitate the style of the old masters, I generally will not take work from a living artist without their explicit permission. Some artists sell tattoo tickets, and allow for people to have their work tattooed that way - this is fine! If you find the original artist and they say they're totally comfortable with their work being used as a tattoo, that is also okay, and I will want to see the exchange in writing somehow and confirm with that person as well. However, if you have not asked for permission and the artist is not long dead, please know that I am more likely to refuse your project.

If you want to find works from the masters of old, I highly recommend visiting museum websites! These are usually well categorized and have high quality photos. Even if they don't have the best photos, they will usually have enough information to find other photographs of the work they're referencing. Some recommendations below: