In preparation for this class session, I looked at a lot of tattoos online in order to have a better understanding of the many types of tattoos that exist. I think that it is almost impossible to create enough categories or names to encompass every single tattoo style, but I found it helpful to break the tattoos I saw down by color, linework, shading, level of realism, and content. To analyze any given tattoo I see, I can ask several questions: Is the tattoo in color or black/grey? If it is in color, is it fully colored in or partially? How many different colors were used? Does the tattoo use linework, or is it lineless? Are the edges soft or hard – do they blend into the skin or contrast with it? Is the tattoo comprised entirely of linework, or is it shaded? Is the linework thick or thin? Does it vary throughout the tattoo? If the tattoo is shaded, what does the shading look like – is it soft or grainy? Is it made of dots, lines, or neither? Is the tattoo photorealistic, a cartoon, or somewhere in between? Is the subject/content of the tattoo real or imagined (or even fully abstract)? Is the tattoo an image, words, or both? If it includes words, what font are the letters in? Are they handwritten? How much space does the tattoo take up on the body? Is it miniature, or does it take up an entire limb or part of the body? Is the tattoo part of a larger piece, like a sleeve, or does it stand alone? These are a lot of questions, but I think they are all necessary to gain a comprehensive understanding of a tattoo, or a tattoo artist’s style.
I asked myself all these questions as I looked at the work of the artist I chose to research, Tori Elyce. Tori does mostly shaded black and grey linework tattoos, and some unshaded linework pieces. Their subject matter is usually not abstract, and falls somewhere between photorealism and cartoon on the realism scale. Tori seems to like tattooing nature imagery, especially small animals (and sometimes dead ones). They have done some experimentation with thicker lines, but mostly stick to thinner lines. Tori almost always does stippled shading, meaning that individual dots are visible in shaded sections. Finally, their tattoos range in size, with some taking up a 2×2 inch square, and others taking up the entire top of someone’s thigh.