Modifying, Personalizing, Combining or Customizing Tattoo Friendly Reference

Each piece of Tattoo Friendly® design reference we sell is a complete, stand-alone piece of artwork designed to make a great tattoo all on its own. However, you may have discovered through browsing TattooFinder.com that while some designs have parts of what you envision for your perfect tattoo, no single design encompasses your complete tattoo vision. In this case, you will want to take a customized approach to coming up with your final tattoo design.

Having an artistically talented tattooist to draw your tattoo from scratch is a typical way to get a custom tattoo design like this. Designing from scratch, however, can be a very labor intensive (and potentially costly) drafting process, and what the tattooist creates as your design may still not be what you had envisioned. When getting a custom tattoo, you would do better to come prepared with reference for the elements you want in your design – or even work with these elements yourself to develop the tattoo you want. Fortunately, Tattoo Friendly reference has been created to help you in this kind of customization process.

Tattooist as “Assembler”: If you have little faith in your artistic talent (and that’s fine), providing to your tattooists printouts of the elements you want to use is a great way to get a customized tattoo. The tattooist can then work with you to assemble the final design using these elements.

Your tattooist can more accurately (and more efficiently) make your ideal design happen for you if you supply this visual reference. Additionally, if your design reference is Tattoo Friendly, you get the benefit of knowing that what you are communicating can be tattooed without first needing to be altered significantly to “make it a tattoo.” For example, if you want a tattoo of a specific kind of dragon, and you are able to provide to your tattooist reference images and stencils of the head and body of the dragon, plus the fire you want to be used as the background, as well as perhaps the Kanji lettering you want to incorporate, your tattooist can take all these “pieces” and assemble them into a final design that should be a good representation of what your ideal tattoo would look like.

Do It Yourself: If you choose to do it yourself, you are going to want to provide your tattooist with a “final” assemblage of what your tattoo should look like on your skin before getting it tattooed. This is the approach that allows you to truly say, “I designed my own tattoo!” Using Tattoo Friendly® design reference in this process will help you tremendously. Since the artwork is Tattoo Friendly, you already know it is going to be tattoo-able. The “hands on” customization technique is to print out your reference, cut it up, and paste it together to create your final design (like putting a jigsaw puzzle together). Or if you are skilled with image manipulation software, you can do this on your own computer, utilizing our high-resolution .PNG downloads, which will provide the size, detail, and transparent backgrounds that you will need. Either way, even if you just get the design really close to a final product, just about any professional tattooist can help you with final touches.

In either the Do It Yourself or Tattooist as ‘Assembler’ custom tattoo approach, you can bring varying levels of your own creativity into the process of coming up with your final design. Those who favor customization like it because it results in a more unique design. You may have started with visual reference that others have used, but, through your creative ideas and/or through collaboration with your tattooist, you end up with something that is truly yours. The custom approach can allow for high levels of creative control (knowing what the final design will look like BEFORE it is applied to your skin). If you do plan on custom collaboration with a tattooist and creative control is important to you, confirm that the tattooist will provide you with the final design and not just a rough “assembly sketch” before getting tattooed.

A more complex custom tattoo will generally require more time and cost more. It may take more time to find the various multiple designs as the reference you want to incorporate. If you are a “do-it-yourself” person, it will take time to work with the reference to create your final design. If you will be providing reference for your tattooist to assemble, it will take time for your tattooist to come up with the final design (and most likely, the tattooist will charge for this work). Again, the best way to keep costs down in this area is to provide Tattoo Friendly design reference that most accurately reflects the elements of the final design you want to have tattooed. For more information about Tattoo Friendly reference, please visit our article, “The Benefits of Using Tattoo Friendly Design Reference”