Getting a small tattoo -- and leaving space for other smaller tattoos?

April 26, 2023 8:40 AM

I'm interested in getting a small symbolic tattoo on my upper arm in a relatively concentrated area. I need ideas for how to add other symbolic tattoos in the future so that they fit/work together, without building a full sleeve!

I have no tattoos currently, mainly because I have too many ideas. But am thinking of getting my first later this year, and want to potentially be able to add in other symbolic tattoos alongside it in a way that they work together -- even if one idea is, for example, my favorite band lyric, and the other is a representative photo of my kids. I would have probably 5-7 over time that ideally would fit in a tighter space on the side of my bicep. I'm not particularly interested in adding them ALL over my arm, or adding them in other places on my body -- hence wanting to have them somehow work together and be additive over time!

I keep searching for "small tattoos in container" or other such ideas, and I only am getting either single small tattoos or full sleeves. Is there a way to creatively think about the shape of tattoos so they tesselate to one another? Or perhaps do something creative like a film strip or a band around my arm with spaces in it?

Open to whatever ideas or suggestions you have! Would also love to know if you have good links for ideas for this sort of thing, too.

posted by knownassociate to Clothing, Beauty, & Fashion (4 answers total)

You might be well-served to go into a tattoo shop or two and look at some portfolios and chat with some artists. There are some assumptions here that may or may not work at all - you're not going to get anything like a photo into a really small space, the resolution of a tattoo has a pretty hard limit. And tattoo artists are artists - they understand the medium and the limitations and can talk about strategies they've used/seen. (My old tattoo artist said that one of the most common misconceptions was how detailed you can make a really small tattoo - it's just not possible to do work past a certain fineness.)
posted by restless_nomad at 8:47 AM on April 26, 2023 [10 favorites]

This is a great idea. I've seen some folks do this with a series of hexagons, which individual artists can then fill. Here's a Google image search on that concept
posted by deadtrouble at 8:55 AM on April 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

If you want to have a masterplan for a small sort-of-half sleeve, an artist can definitely work with you on that! But I will say artists are great at fitting other tattoos around each other and putting things together. I've been getting tattoos on one upper arm from all different artists for a while. Nothing is bigger than my palm, and I've added over time. I recently had someone do some small pieces to fill gaps. The arm is a few different styles, and includes geometric shapes, hand-poked tattoos, and words. It's all black and white for cohesion. I didn't plan it the whole area in advance; artists I've worked with have been happy to look at positioning and placement to fit pieces together and make it cohesive. One term you can search for is "patchwork tattoos".
posted by quadrilaterals at 9:07 AM on April 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Seconding restless_nomad’s note about tattoo size and consulting artists about your ideas first. For reference, also, look up “aged tattoos” and you’ll see that ink tends to fade and spread out with time, so a photo sized to 1/5 of your bicep will probably end up as a gray blob with time. Here’s a gallery of some examples of aged small tattoos. So a small tattoo that looks crisp to start out with will probably not stay that way after a few years. Many good artists will have pictures of healed and/or aged tattoos in their portfolio or Instagram highlights and will be honest about how many touchups they’ve done.
posted by music for skeletons at 12:01 PM on April 26, 2023