It’s happened to the best of us: you have a few drinks and decide that it would be a great idea to let your friend handpoke a tattoo that reads “BEER” on your leg. Or maybe your ex-boyfriend’s name is taking up valuable space on your arm. Whatever – you have a tattoo you want to cover up.
Tattoo cover-ups can come out very well, as long as you follow a few simple rules:
- Black is the only color that is truly opaque in tattoing. All other colors have a certain amount of transparency. This means you need to forget any ideas about covering your tattoo with white. Any tattoo you get will have to be bigger, darker, and bolder than the original. You will not be able to cover your black tribal with a yellow sun!
- Fur, feathers, scales, waves, complex organic flowers… pick a subject matter that could incorporate a lot of pattern and texture. This will allow for a lot of black shading and shadowy areas. But don’t bother asking to cover a tattoo with lettering or black graphic elements – any black against the skin that uses positive space will probably not work.
- Think about what you would want if you could get any tattoo. If you hate what you have, but really like tattoos, then put some thought into it. You need to find somebody really good and let go – let them do what needs to be done. Refer to earlier articles here. Obviously the decisions that you made before were terrible, so open your mind a little to what the tattoo artist has to say.
- You probably won’t be able to pick a design off the wall, or online. Your tattoo artist will need to draw you a custom design or at least modify an existing one.
- Don’t try to go small. Go big! The smaller the tattoo, the less effective it will be as a cover-up.
- Be patient – a good cover-up may take a few sessions. It will often work better with layered colors and tones, and this takes time. Sometimes if you go over the color in a tattoo after it is healed it can make a big difference.
Perhaps the ideal solution would be to completely remove the tattoo. Laser tattoo removal is an option, albeit an expensive, painful and imperfect one, for removing a tattoo. Although we have never seen a tattoo be completely removed, a skilled technician can get very close. Using laser to lighten a tattoo, on the other hand, is great idea before you get a cover-up. It will give you exponentially more cover-up options.
Also, do you hate the concept or the tattoo? Maybe you don’t need to get your tattoo covered-up, just reworked. If you let somebody good in on it, you might be able to turn a lame dolphin your got on the jersey shore into something kinda awesome.
Have a good cover-up story? Share!
