Here’s a great looking deliberately naive tattoo. Sorry not the best tattoo picture, but I am talking about the tattoo design. Problem is you have to be a really good artist to achieve this.

There’s lots of talk as of late about designing your own tattoo. As usual there are pros and cons to this.

A pro about about designing your own tattoo is that you will be assured of having a very unique tattoo design and it will be meaningful to you.

A con is that your tattoo design might be poorly designed.

Sorry for the harsh words but this comes from years of being a a freelance artist and watching the behavior of clients. Design is the first place that a client will want to haggle the price. Why? Because it is a not a set cost of production so they will try to weasel out of it. You can’t cut manufacturing costs or the cost of tools, but you can decide not to buy a service.

This becomes even more problematic because secretly everyone thinks that they can draw. We are all fashion design or graphic design wannabes – our houses are the most stylish, our clothing is the bomb, our business cards are impeccable too.

Now this may be true that deep inside we are all artists and stylish, but the truth is that these talents may be not up to speed. It takes some knowledge of graphic design and skill to be good at design.

If you aren’t familiar with the principles of design, then your tattoo might come out looking very amateurish. You might not be willing to see it – but others will see it as being very low quality.

Another con is that you just might not know enough about the difficulties of tattoo design. This is where skill counts.  A tattoo artist has to consider many things when designing a tattoo – there’s the color, the shape, size. Will it fit the location?

If you are not bothered with the chance of ending up with an amateurish looking tattoo design in order to save a few bucks, then sure, go ahead. Perhaps a deliberately “naive art style”  is the look you are going for. They can be very appealing if done correctly. See above.

But really – a tattoo is something permanent. Why skimp on that? Some tattoos cost mere dollars to buy online. Other galleries have a monthly fee that costs as much as a movie. Surely you can splurge that in something as important a tattoo – an expression of your self.

If you really want to have a unique tattoo design, an easy thing to do is take sections of existing tattoo designs and mash  them together.

Another suggestion is to co-draw with a real tattoo artist. Take your drawing to a pro and have them perfect it up.

Make sure to get a tattoo artist with strong drawing  skills and who knows how the design will play out as a tattoo. Then you can still have a truly original design that you designed, but one that is attractive, properly crafted and not poorly executed. One that won’t make you – or others – cringe.

Most tattoo memberships aren’t that expensive – costing the equivalent of a night at the movies for two. That’s not a lot to give up for unlimited professional  tattoo designs.

photo credit: Rachel Kramer Bussel