Search styles or cities

Log inJoinLog inJoin Log inJoinLog inJoin

Tattoo styles

Tattoo styles

YokoFolioTattoo portfolios, by style.

Tattoo styles About FAQ Contact Legal Terms Language Instagram

Search styles or cities

Log inJoinLog inJoin Log inJoinLog inJoin

Tattoo styles

Tattoo styles

Every tattoo style has its own history, its own techniques and its own artists. Browse the 41 styles below, from fine line to Japanese irezumi, to see what makes each one unique and which tattoos people save the most. When you find yours, discover the tattoo artists and shops who specialize in it near you.

Abstract
Abstract tattooing represents nothing: shapes, marks and a visible gesture, composed for a body in motion.
Anime & Manga
Anime & Manga tattoos reproduce an existing drawing style: crisp outlines, saturated flats, and fidelity to the original line.
Berber
The Berber, or Amazigh, tattoo uses geometric signs that speak of protection, life stages and belonging.
Bio-organic
Bio-organic keeps biomechanical's staging and swaps steel for flesh: muscle, cartilage, articulated bone.
Biomechanical
Biomechanical shows machinery under the flesh: pistons, cables and plates that seem to work beneath an opened skin.
Blackwork
Blackwork uses black and nothing else. Bare skin becomes a color of its own, and the shapes read from thirty feet away.
Celtic
Celtic comes from Irish and Scottish insular art: endless interlace, woven knots, spirals and animals drawn out into ribbons.
Chicano
Chicano works in very soft black and grey: portraits, worked lettering, and stories of family, faith and loyalty.
Chrome
Chrome imitates polished metal: mirror surfaces, horizon highlights and liquid curves, made entirely out of values.
Coptic
The Coptic cross on the wrist of Egypt's Christians: a mark of belonging handed down through generations, not an ornament.
Cyber-sigilism
Cyber-sigilism pulls tribal toward the sign: very fine points, thorns and nervous interlacing, almost always in black.
Cyber-tribal
Cyber-tribal takes tribal's points and symmetries and breaks them: vector edges, pixels, fragments that look recomputed.
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk tattoos a whole world: neon, circuitry, prosthetics and rain-soaked cities, in a cold, saturated palette.
Dotwork
Dotwork builds its shading out of dots: no solid lines, a fine grain, and a steadiness of hand that's rare.
Engraving
Engraving brings the burin onto skin: parallel and cross-hatching, with volume built out of the density of the line.
Fine Line
Fine Line rests on one thin, steady line, plenty of bare skin, and no black mass to cover up a slip.
Geometric
Geometric tattooing works in circles, patterns and symmetry. It represents nothing, and it forgives nothing.
Ignorant Style
Ignorant Style embraces the clumsy line, the wrong proportions and the absurd subject, in black and at small size.
Illustrative
Illustrative tattooing owns the fact that it's a drawing: modulated line, hatching and texture, somewhere between engraving and a comic page.
Japanese · Irezumi
Japanese tattooing thinks in whole bodies: dragons, koi and masks joined by wind and water backgrounds, under a strict grammar.
Lettering
Lettering means first names, dates and quotes: gothic, script or block, usually drawn by hand rather than typed.
Māori
Tā moko is the tattooing of the Māori of New Zealand: composed for one person, it speaks of their lineage and their story.
Minimalist
Minimalist tattooing is defined by what it leaves out: a shape cut to essentials, with composed empty space around it.
Neo-Japanese
Neo-Japanese takes the figures of irezumi — dragon, koi, mask — and leaves the rules: modulated outlines, free framing.
Neo-realism
Neo-realism keeps realism's modeling and composes around it: unreal color, bursts, abstract backgrounds, unapologetic artifice.
Neo-traditional
Neo-traditional keeps the black outline of old school and adds volume, ornament and a much wider palette.
New School
New School pushes everything past the limit: fluorescent color, forced perspective, and cartoon characters full of motion.
Nordic
Nordic draws on Viking art: interlaced stretched animals, knots, runes and figures from Norse mythology.
Old School
Old School means the heavy black outline, four bold colors, and a sailor's repertoire you recognize on sight.
One Line
One Line describes the whole design with a single stroke that never lifts: the crossings are part of the drawing.
Organic
Organic grows living matter under the skin: bone, roots, coral and scales, with no symmetry and no anchor point.
Ornamental
Ornamental tattooing comes from jewelry and lace: it tells no story, it adorns, and it follows the line of the body.
Patutiki
Patutiki is Marquesan tattooing: the body divided into named panels, filled with dense figures and tiki.
Polynesian
Polynesian tatau works in bands of named motifs — teeth, waves, spears — where placement counts as much as the drawing.
Realism
Realism chases the illusion: portraits, animals and textures so faithful you forget you're looking at a drawing.
Sicanje
Sicanje is hand-poked onto the hands: crosses, sun circles and scatters of dots, worn mostly by women, from childhood on.
Suminagashi
Suminagashi carries Japanese floating-ink marbling onto skin: warped rings and veins, a movement of water tattooed.
Trash Polka
Trash Polka uses nothing but black and red: a piece of photorealism, and the raw gesture that tears it up.
Tribal
Tribal works black masses, points and symmetry, borrowed from Pacific art without the systems of meaning behind it.
Watercolor
Watercolor puts washes, runs and splashes of color on the skin, often with no outline to hold them in.
Yoruba
The Yoruba tattoo draws on the mask and the textile as much as on the lineage mark — an inheritance of relief, not of ink.