Tuesday, October 22, 2013

The hard truth on lettering/words/phrases/books for tattoos

Yesterday at the shop while tattoo Lovely Lexy, me and Jessie got into a conversation about lettering tattoos. It seems to be the new craze. I think over the past 5 years lettering and phrases has become quite popular. We do a lot of wording tattoos at the shop but I think it would be wise to almost forewarn people about committing to a lot of words. Here is a list of mostly cons for doing lettering.
 1.TYPOS! I swear in almost every tattoo that consists of 6 or more words, you will always find a typo. A mis spelled word is super common. Which sucks for obvious reasons.
 2. I think lettering is rigid. I prefer organic natural flow of designs for the body since the body is an ever changing canvas. I think designs that lend themselves to change on the body is best... Lettering needs to stay legible over time. Catch my drift...
3. I am really doubting a lot of script, not done in the right size will hold up over time! And in most cases lettering needs to be small to fit a certain area. People want lettering on the arm for example- if a person has only a few inches of space like the wrist area then I would only do one word there.
4. THE RIBS are a hot spot right now for scripture and I think if you want a paragraph of text, expect to take up your whole side then.
5. Another thing that worries me is- I hope this doesn't become like the tribal thing in the 90's. If people end up wanting the words covered in the next 5-15 years it will be extremely hard to do. Lettering actually is really hard to cover up. Just like black tribal work. It is one of the worst things to cover! Lettering and black tribal is just not forgiving in case you need to re work it or cover it up.

Here is the tattoo I was doing when we started talking about the lettering phenomenon
Here's a good one. If there were two more rows of text that could be considered A LOT.
I like one word sentiments or empowerment pieces.

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