Jiran crafts bold body art that blurs the line between the New School style and American Traditional. The designs feature thick black outlines and solid shades of color that look like they were applied with a set of markers. They’re minimalist yet charming; the Seoul-based artist makes all of her characters less menacing by adding […]
Author: Sara Barnes
Bold Tattoos by Inez Janiak Look Like Charcoal Drawings
Inez Janiak creates tattoos that look as though they’re drawn with charcoal or pen. The Poland-based artist has seemingly ripped her designs from the pages of a sketchbook and flawlessly translated them onto human skin. The bold yet unsure lines—which vary in weight line like the drawing tool—retain their energetic look and feel, like they’re […]
Drawings and Paintings of Opposing Forces by Christina Mrozik
Years ago, artist Christina Mrozik had a stomach disease in which she couldn’t digest or absorb the nutrients from food. “After becoming rail thin and suffering through daily nightmares and being racked with pain for months on end,” she described, “I became very connected with a deeper part of myself.” Death, among other things, became […]
Black-Ink Portraits Accented with a Hint of Red by Denis Marakhin
St. Petersburg-based artist Denis Marakhin uses red ink as a striking accent color to his bold tattoos and drawings. The stylized pieces are reminiscent of graphic novels that utilize shape-driven shading, some parts flattened and opaque, and other parts with defined forms. Like a comic book, Marakhin also incorporates text into the works, carving out […]
10 Artists Who Use Animation to Create Tattoos in Motion
Motion is a concept that has intrigued even the earliest humans. A bowl dating back 5,200 years was found during the 1970s in Iran’s Burnt City. On it, five sequential images were found on its surface—a primitive zoetrope that produced the illusion of a goat jumping once the bowl was spun. Since that time, creatives […]
Etching-Inspired Tattoos by Robert Pavez
Robert Pavez is a self-trained tattoo artist whose formal training lies in graphic design—which is also where his career started. From 2007 to 2014 he was a print designer, seeing tattooing as a hobby. After developing his illustrative style—whose influences include geometry, etching, and artists like MC Escher—he began tattooing full time in Chile. “I […]
Illustration Meets Fashion: Clothing as Moving Art
Sewing is deeply ingrained into our history as human beings. During the Paleolithic era, early humans used bones to fashion crude sewing needles that they’d then use to sew together animal skins with sinew thread. Eventually, this design was refined, with the first known needle-with-eye dating back about 25,000 years ago. Sewing was done by […]
Candy-Colored Tattoos by Katie Shocrylas
Katie Shocrylas creates tattoos that look like an edgier version of the iconic illustrator Lisa Frank. The rainbow-colored works use a similarly vibrant palette that turns everything—no matter how realistic her drawings may be—into a technicolor dreamscape. For Shocrylas, the relationships that come from tattooing is truly special. “I have always loved the fact that […]
Digimatism: A Future Visual Language by Stanislaw Wilczynski
Moscow-based tattoo artist Stanislaw Wilczynski produces shape-centric imagery that is born out of the Digimatism movement. Digimatism, a combination of the words “digital” and “suprematism,” describes his bold abstract assemblages that are created with the help of the computer. This contemporary approach has a historic bend to it by recalling artistic movements from the early […]
Guga Scharf’s Erratic Line Tattoos Inspired by Sketchbook Drawings
Many tattoo artists create drawings and paintings off the skin, and Guga Scharf is an example of how the two worlds intersect. Borrowing imagery from his pencil and ink sketchbook, he translates the surrealist, minimal aesthetic into his tattoos. Erratic lines and squiggles decorate his characters, which are used as both a device for shading […]