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Yes, blackout tattoos are really a thing, bold designs and remarkable finish.
With this kind of tattoos, it’s 100% sure you are going to catch every sight in every place you stay.
And you know it.
Because of this, we think you should read this guide before getting inked with a blackout tattoo, so you can do it safely.
Maybe blackout tattoos have the simplest explanation in all the tattoo styles, as you can see right know:
Blackout tattoos are just covering entirely with black ink some area of your body, usually a big one.
That’s all, nothing more, nothing less.
The point is that you can combine blackout tattoos with other styles and shapes, so the possibilities of something as simple as this are close to infinite.
Here you can see an amazing blackout tattoo in a entire arm, with ornamental details in the up and down it.
As you may notice, this tattoo is truly bold, and you must be really secure for get ink on that way.
And we do love it 😊
This tattoo is made by Oliver Kenton, from San Francisco, in the US, he has a lot of fantastic ornamental tattoos on his Instagram account and website.
You can feel blackout tattoos are something trendy and modern, but it’s just the opposite.
I tell you more.
In the very beginning of the tattoo as a concept, the tribal people used to get ink with carbon and bones.
Well, the easier way to get ink on these days was just getting black ink in big areas, with some archaic designs.
Blackout tattoos comes from these tribal ones, as an evolution to our days.
Sincerely, not very far away of these days.
Blackout tattoos are a trend since 2016, when a Singaporean tattoo artist called Chester Lee started to grow the trend a lot.
Here is the chart of how is searched “blackout tattoo” in Google all around the world and, as you can see, the trend has an inflection point back in April 2016.
Then, the trend is kind of the same until today.
We can say there are three different kind of blackout tattoo, according to how it’s done.
The first kind of blackout tattoo maybe it’s the easier one:
When the blackout tattoo is a design by itself.
It can be only black ink on a part of the body, or it can be black ink with negative space with different shapes.
Because this can be very tricky to visualize in your mind, here you can find some examples:
The first blackout tattoo we want to show you is a kind of design which is a thing by itself.
Just a black hand and a good shape in the arm.
You can see how remarkable this kind of tattoos are, the skin turns into something hypnotic!
The tattoo artist of this piece of work is Alvin Chirima, from Treviso, in Italy. He is a tattoo apprentice, but he has a lot of nice designs on his Instagram account.
So, you must know him!
Another example of a classic blackout design is this one.
Two symmetrical bands on each arm, something simple, but remarkable too.
The design itself is very harmonic and, with this, you can see what can you got with this kind of style.
The tattoo is done by Krzysztof Wisniewski, tattoo artist from Warsaw, in Poland.
He is focused on different abstract tattoo styles (ornamental, blackout, dotwork, abstract itself), and you should know more about him!
Another thing you can do is getting a blackout tattoo to cover up another tattoo you don’t want anymore.
I can tell you it’s usually not a good idea, because it something very desperate, just to erase all with more ink.
There are another tattoo styles, and you can do a cover up properly without dramatic consequences.
Here you can find some examples and, even the design is good (or fantastic), we do not recommend this kind of actions.
Here you can see a nice blast over blackout tattoo.
A Blast Over is not only a cover up, but you also make the most with the previous tattoo and give it a second life with a new layer.
This is a live example by our beloved Madda, from Napoli, in Italy.
She works in Little Star tattoo studio a lot of good works at ornamental, abstract and blackwork tattoo styles.
We are sure she is going to be one of the big ones!
Just one example of a nice cover up tattoo with a blackout design is here.
As you can see, a big size for the upper part of the back, with a clean design and some natural shapes there.
The result:
Very harmonic with a big size, and that is not easy!
The tattoo artist who made this tattoo is Torg, in France and Switzerland.
At his Instagram account you can see a lot of good designs, not only blackout, ornamental, abstract and realism ones to!
Another thing you can do is to combine blackout tattoos with other styles so you can create a huge piece of tattoo with two or more atmospheres.
The possibilities are endless and you can find some examples here, but we do like combining blackout with geometrical or abstract tattoo.
Blackout tattoos are interesting by itself, but we think they become even more interesting if you combine them with another tattoo styles.
For example, here you can find another pattern, like a negative space up and below the blackout zone.
And we think it’s beautiful.
The tattoo artist who made it is Mikel, from Sacred Heart Tattoo in Vancouver, Canada.
He have some nice ornamental, tribal and even Haida tattoos, so he is a must-known tattoo artists!
Another example of a blackout tattoo with other tattoo styles is this one, with some flowers in negative space.
We do love this design and we think it’s very harmonic and natural, but bold too.
Perfect.
The tattoo artist name is Sarah, she is from Malta and she is focused on neotraditional and watercolor designs but, as you can see, she does spectacular blackout designs too!
Finally, we want to share with you this mix between blackout tattoos and neotraditional with some colored flowers.
The mix between all this black ink and the red flowers is remarkable, we think it fits perfect, and give the design a lot of life.
We mean it.
The design is made by Hoode Tattoo, and you can find on their Instagram account a lot of big size blackout designs.
They are just awesome!
Maybe you have read that you must watch out blackout tattoos because they have a lot of ink and this ink have heavy metals like the painting in automotive industry.
But that’s not true.
Tattoo inks have no metals for decades, and tattoo inks are 100% safe, so you can get ink with a tattoo as big as you want, just pick a professional tattoo artist with professional equipment, and let the magic begins!
The Tattoo Artist Community.
