Tattoo Placement Guide

Tattoo Placement Considerations: Customer Consultation

Most customers won’t have a good understanding of tattoo placement and what makes a design look good on the body.

Whether the client has an idea of where they want their tattoo or they’re open to your suggestions, it’s a good idea to run through these ideas with them before you start designing:

“Job Stoppers” (Hard-to-Hide Tattoos)

While the stigma against tattoos is starting to change, hand, face, and neck tattoos (known as “job-stoppers”) change the way you are treated by others. Tattoos in these areas often get people stopped at customs and by police more often, and they keep people from being allowed into some licensed venues.

Additionally, job-stoppers limit career opportunities since most corporate jobs (which tend to pay the most) don’t accept applicants with visible tattoos. If your client is not heavily tattooed yet - or if they’re very young - you might want to advise them against getting a tattoo in such a visible area.

The size and detail of the tattoo should match the placement of the tattoo. If you consider each part of the body as its own “canvas,” then it’s easy to see that large and detailed tattoos (like a Japanese design) just won’t fit right on someone’s wrist. Even if you could somehow cram all that detailed linework into such a small space, overtime the lines would blur together and leave a “blob” of ink on the skin.  

On the other hand, while small tattoos (ex: symbols) can look good on large parts of the body, having lots of small tattoos on a large area ruins the “canvas.” Trying to piece together a bunch of small tattoos will never look as good as a big tattoo done all at once.

If your client wants to get a tattoo that won’t work for the area, you’ll need to let them know that it won’t turn out exactly how they imagine and steer them toward a different placement.

Most artists - and clients - will decide that pain is temporary and worth a tattoo that lasts a lifetime.

However, if it’s a client’s first tattoo, it might be best to advise away from big tattoos or particularly painful areas, like the ribs or armpit. It’s hard to mentally prepare for that type of pain if they’ve never felt it before, and talking them into an easier placement will help them have a better experience (and keep them from tapping out).

Numbing Cream

If your client has a low pain tolerance, using numbing cream might help them get through the tattoo. Numbing cream won’t take the pain away entirely, but for some people, just the idea of it will make the tattoo easier for them mentally.

Bodies change over time, which means the tattoos on them change, too. If your client is planning to see a big change in their body (if they’re planning for major weight loss, pregnancy, significant muscle gain, etc.), then a tattoo’s design might become warped as the skin changes.

For example, if a client is planning to get pregnant, then it might be best to wait for a tattoo near the stomach or hips. It is possible to tattoo over stretch marks after pregnancy, but if they get the tattoo beforehand, the design could change permanently.

If your client is planning to get more tattoos (for example, if they want a full sleeve later on), then putting a tiny tattoo in the center of their forearm or bicep could make that more difficult. They’ll either need to cover it up or it’ll have to be incorporated into a future sleeve design.

Even turning a 3/4 sleeve into a full sleeve will be hard. Let your client know that it’s best to decide what they want before they start getting tattoos, and then to stick with that decision.

Designing for Tattoo Placement: Design Process

Now that you’ve figured out the placement, you’ll need to design for that part of the body. Here’s a few things to keep in mind:

Ideally, the tattoo you design will fit the shape of the body and fully “fill” the space. For example, a half sleeve should be big enough to fill up the rounded shape of the shoulder or a forearm tattoo shouldn’t wrap so far around the arm that it overlaps.

Tattoo designs that flow look like they belong on the body. Designs that don’t flow look awkward. Designing with flow means following the musculature of the body.

Use the Lines of the Body

For small lines of script, you can follow the “flow” of the body by putting the tattoo directly on one of the prominent lines of the body, like on the spine or in a straight line down the inner bicep or forearm.

When a person is standing with their arms relaxed at their sides, their tattoos should be right side up. Some customers prefer to have their designs facing them, but it’s generally considered against the aesthetic “rules” of tattooing.

When a tattoo design has a face, it should either face inward or forward, depending on the tattoo’s placement. For example, an image with a face on the chest should face inward toward the body’s center line. An image with a face on the outer thigh should face forward.

Placement Matters: Redesigning Tattoos for a New Placement

In some cases, your client will have a design they like, but they’ll want it in a placement that won’t work. If they want a design they found online that isn’t a tattoo, you’ll need to rework the image so that it will flow like a tattoo on their body and work with the placement they’ve chosen.

Redesign Example

However, sometimes an image won’t work as a tattoo. For example, if a client has a photo of roses side by side on a piece of paper that they want tattooed on their inner wrist, you would have to explain that having roses side-by-side like that would wrap around their wrist…and that all the little details wouldn’t fit on such a small area of the body.

Then, you can offer them possible solutions for the best placement. For example, they can simplify the design and keep the wrist placement, or they can keep the detailed design but move it to a different area.

Finding the Perfect Placement

Here’s our suggestions on small, medium, large, and extra large tattoo placements:

Helpful tools for Deciding on Tattoo Placement

If you want to get inspiration for different placements or test how a tattoo will look on a certain area, you can use these tools to help:

InkHunter

This app uses augmented reality to let you see a tattoo on your own (or your client’s) body and test how it looks in different areas.

Inkpedia

This is a giant online library of tattoos. You can search tattoos for individual body parts to get inspiration.

Learn to Master Tattooing with the Artist Accelerator Program

Learning about design and tattoo placement are some of the first steps on your journey to becoming a tattoo artist. Next, you need to learn how to tattoo the right way and bring your artwork to life.

There’s a ton of information out there that promises to teach you to tattoo, but a lot of it is outdated or incorrect. This is why most tattoo artists trying to learn online pick up bad habits that can take years to unlearn.

If you want to learn how to tattoo the right way, you can still do it online and at your own pace.

We created the Artist Accelerator Program to give aspiring artists all the lessons and techniques they need in an easy-to-follow, 9-step roadmap that can take anyone from complete beginner to professional tattoo artist in as little as 90 days.

Inside the program, you’ll learn the skills tattoo artists use every day, get personalized guidance from professionals, and put together a portfolio that gets you hired.

Skip the years of trial and error and start building a career you love today.