Chrome

On YokoFolio, pick the style Chrome and then your city, and widen the radius: it's a recent style and still not widespread. The test is clear — look at the distance between the blacks and the whites. Believable chrome alternates very dense blacks and areas of bare skin, with short transitions; if the values are soft, the reflection doesn't read. Check too that every highlight obeys the same light and that the horizon line runs cleanly across the shape. Ask for healed work: that's where the contrast either holds or gets lost. When you contact the artist from their profile, ask how large your design needs to be for the effect to read, and which highlights will be bare skin and which white ink.

No, and it's the question asked most often about this style. No ink reflects light the way metal does: the pigment sits under the skin, so it can never act as a mirror. The chrome effect is an illusion produced entirely by values — very deep blacks, whites that are untattooed skin, and transitions placed just right. Inks sold as metallic or reflective don't change that once they're in the skin, and iridescent chrome works the same way, with ordinary colors set beside the highlights. Be wary of any promise along those lines and judge on healed photos. An artist who masters the style will talk to you about contrast and size, not about a special ink.

It's the most requested version of the style: soft shapes with no corners, like drops of mercury sitting on the skin, sometimes dripping or melting into one another. It comes straight from the 3D renders of the 2000s and from the digital design that fashion brought back. The effect rests entirely on where the highlights sit and on the horizon line that cuts the shape — that line is what your eye reads as a sky, with the ground reflected darker below it. Names, hearts and free-form shapes all work in liquid chrome, as long as the outline stays simple. Plan on a generous surface: shrunk down, the highlights merge and the effect disappears.

Cyberpunk tattoos a world: neon signs, circuits, robots, glitches, cities in the rain, usually in a cold palette of cyan, magenta and violet over deep black. Chrome tattoos a material: a single shape or a word turned into polished metal, mostly in black and grey, with mirror highlights and no scene around it. Biomechanical shows working machinery — pistons, cables, plates, gears — beneath a skin that seems torn open, following the muscles. Chrome opens nothing: the metal is the surface itself, smooth or liquid, reflecting a sky. A Cyberpunk scene can borrow chrome surfaces, and its photo on YokoFolio can then carry both styles, the main one first. If the tattoo is a shape or a word that looks like polished or liquid metal, with no scene and no opened skin, it's Chrome.