Tattoo Styles

Every tattoo style our 1,300+ artists work in, ranked by how common it is.

• Fine Line
  432 artists
  Fine-line tattoos use a single-needle setup to draw delicate, continuous lines — minimal shading, no colour fills, and a precise, drawn-on-paper feel.
• Blackwork
  384 artists
  Blackwork tattoos use only black ink, often with heavy solid fills and bold geometric or illustrative forms.
• Realism
  372 artists
  Realism tattoos reproduce a photograph or lifelike subject using heavy shading, tonal gradients, and minimal black outlines.
• Traditional (American)
  203 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)
  84 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.
• Neo-traditional
  80 artists
  Neo-traditional tattoos extend American traditional with broader colour palettes, richer shading, and modern illustrative subjects while retaining bold outlines.
• Geometric
  79 artists
  Geometric tattoos use precise shapes — triangles, circles, polygons, sacred-geometry forms — arranged into symmetric or fractal compositions.
• Lettering
  66 artists
  Lettering tattoos render text — scripts, quotes, single words — as the primary subject, in a typeface chosen for meaning and placement.
• Illustrative
  50 artists
  Illustrative tattoos read like a drawing from a sketchbook or storybook, combining line weight variation, loose shading, and personal subject matter.
• Watercolour
  40 artists
  Watercolour tattoos mimic the wash-and-bleed of watercolour paint — soft edges, drips, splatters, and colour gradients without hard outlines.
• Dotwork
  39 artists
  Dotwork tattoos build shading and pattern from thousands of individual dots rather than solid fills or lines, producing a pointillist texture.
• Micro-realism
  32 artists
  Micro-realism tattoos render photorealistic detail at small scales — palm-sized portraits, tiny landscapes, miniature objects — using single-needle precision.
• 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.
• 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.