Ignorant Style

On YokoFolio, pick the style Ignorant Style and then your city, and widen the radius if you need to. The test here is unusual: look for a hand of their own. A sincerely clumsy line doesn't look like an imitated clumsy line, and the artists who really work in this style all have a recognizable vocabulary. Be wary of portfolios where Ignorant Style shows up as one box among many — that's rarely the one to pick. In healed photos, the drawing should still look naive but the tattooing clean: solid black, no patchy or blown-out lines, nothing blurred. Most of these artists post flash, so choose Flash rather than Tattoo to see the sheets they have ready. Ask whether they would draw your own idea in their hand, or only tattoo their flash.

The name says it all: it claims ignorance of the rules of the craft — correct drawing, shading, proportion, the beautiful line. That refusal is a deliberate choice, and it's what separates it from a botched tattoo, where nobody chose anything. It still takes a sure hand: like the tag it comes from, the line goes down in one pass, with no rework and no second thoughts, and a hesitation shows immediately. The clumsiness is in the drawing, never in the tattooing: the black has to be solid and the line has to heal clean. Most pieces fit inside a couple of inches, in black alone, and they're meant to be read in a second: a joke, a doodle, an image that makes you smile.

Rarely, and that's more or less the point. The style makes fun of symbolism and solemnity: it puts down a joke, an absurd image, a memory, a word. Plenty of people who wear them collect several, picked up across encounters and trips, often chosen on the spot from a flash sheet at a flash day or a convention, and the collection ends up saying something none of the individual pieces does. If you're after meaning, this isn't the style; if you're after lightness, it's exactly the one. One practical note: for a first try, avoid a very visible spot until you know whether this vocabulary suits you.

Both are small, simple and usually black, which is why they get mixed up, but they want opposite things. Look at the line first: in Ignorant Style it wobbles, changes weight and looks scribbled on purpose; in Minimalist it's clean, steady and exact. Then look at the drawing: Ignorant Style has wrong proportions, a childlike or cartoon look and often a joke in it, while Minimalist reduces a real shape to its essentials, with right proportions and composed empty space around it. A Minimalist crescent moon is a perfect curve; an Ignorant Style moon might wear sunglasses and a crooked smile. On YokoFolio, the two never go together. If the drawing looks clumsy on purpose, like a doodle done with full confidence, it's Ignorant Style.