When tattooing darker skin tones, it’s harder to create contrast between ink colors. However, if you know a few techniques, you can create tattoos that pop on all different skin tones.
That’s why, in this article, we’ll be breaking down how to take your client’s skin tone into account while tattooing, including:
How to Tattoo Darker Skin Tones
1
Use Bold Linework
To make sure your linework stands out against dark skin, you’ll want to use thick outlines, as opposed to small and detailed linework.
A thick outline will really break apart the tattoo so you can clearly see where everything is in your design. It will also make the tattoo more readable, even from afar.
2
Use Fewer Values
When designing a tattoo for a client with a dark skin tone, you will need to work with more limited values.
On lighter skin tones, more values (lighter gray washes and lighter colors) are easy to see. However, the darker the skin tone, the fewer values you should incorporate.When you start with the tattoo, go in with your darkest values first. This will let you make sure the most powerful areas stand out. Then, you can lighten things up from there. Since you’ll be using just a few values, this can be tricky. The best way to prepare is to do some drawing studies with fewer tones to practice.
3
Limit the Amount of Shading You Use
With very light skin, you might go through the tattoo and use several different gray washes to make different transitions. However, with darker skin tones, it will be more difficult to see that lighter gray wash, and you will be causing trauma to the skin for no reason.
4
Use a Dark Background
Creating contrast is a great way to make a tattoo pop. Making the background of a tattoo as dark as possible by packing black ink and making the foreground light will push the foreground forward.
However, you need to make sure those light tones are easy to distinguish. If you do a dark background and then also include lots of shading, the entire tattoo will become too dark and blend together with no light tones to break it apart. Many tattoo artists forget that skin breaks are just as important as where you place the ink when it comes to readability.
Planning is key when it comes to creating this type of contrast. You want to make sure that you're thinking about all these things before jumping onto the tattoo because it will be easy to get lost and end up with a tattoo you’re not happy with.
5
Make the Tattoo Large
No matter how perfectly you do a tattoo, the ink will expand a bit underneath the skin over time. If you go too small with a design, especially on darker skin tones, the healed tattoo will eventually become unreadable.
You make sure you're doing your design big enough so it stands out and lasts through time.
6
Know How Color Works on Darker Skin Tones
Image credit: @mrlauder
You definitely can create colorful tattoos on darker skin tones, but it’s important to remember that the colors that you're putting into the skin are going to show up darker on a darker complected person.
The tones inside the skin are going to be much darker as soon as they're done healing. So it works best to choose color tattoo ink that you know is going to heal up correctly in the skin to the tone you’re aiming for.
Additionally, the undertones of a person’s skin color can be red, yellow, or blue. Take a look at the chart to see how colored ink shows up differently depending on the skin’s undertone. (For example, dark blues and dark greens might show up looking darker than intended, while yellow and white ink might be hard to see.)
7
Review the Healing Process with Your Client
It’s important to make sure your client knows what to do after they get a tattoo. If a tattoo heals properly, you won’t have ink “falling out” of the person’s skin, meaning the black ink will still create strong contrast, even in healed photos of the design.
Remind clients to follow proper aftercare instructions after the tattooing process by keeping the tattoo clean and using unscented lotion.
Learn to Tattoo Without an Apprenticeship
In the past, learning in the shop through an apprenticeship was the only way aspiring artists could learn to tattoo. Today, however, artists are skipping the apprenticeship to learn on their own time at home with the Artist Accelerator Program.
The world’s oldest and largest online tattoo course, the Artist Accelerator Program’s easy-to-follow, 9-step framework lets anyone go from complete beginner to professional tattoo artist without the year of grunt work or hazing.
Inside the program, you’ll be taught everything you’d learn in a traditional apprenticeship by professional tattoo artists and receive feedback on your art and tattoos in the program’s private online Mastermind community.
Over 2500 students have used the Artist Accelerator Program’s 9-step framework to break into the tattoo industry, with many opening their own studios or working in shops around the world.
If you’d like to see the framework they used, click here to learn more about the Artist Accelerator Program.
