Illustrative

On YokoFolio, pick the style Illustrative and then your city, and widen the radius if you need to. Look at the images rather than the label: the word covers work that has almost nothing in common, so find the artist whose drawing you'd want on your own skin. The best indicator is the drawing itself — ask to see sketchbooks or preparatory work, because here the quality of the tattoo comes straight from the quality of the drawing. In the tattoos, check that the outlines are clean, that the shading reads as volume and not as smudge, and that the composition holds at a glance. Look for healed pieces where the hatching still breathes. Ask the artist whether they'll draw your piece from scratch, and what size it needs for its detail to last.

Both, and the choice changes the result a lot. In black and grey the style moves toward engraving and book illustration: hatching, texture, hard contrast, and very good durability. In color it moves toward children's-book illustration or poster art, with flat areas and atmosphere, held together by the outline. Black and grey is more forgiving and fits more easily alongside other pieces; color has more immediate presence, and it needs that outline and enough size to stay clean over the years. If the color turns into washes, splashes and drips without outlines, the piece leans toward Watercolor. Look at the artist's portfolio in the version you want: many illustrative artists are much stronger in one than in the other.

It's a version in high demand: gothic, occult or macabre imagery — skulls, ravens, hands, moths, saints, tarot cards — treated in line and hatching, almost always in black. It borrows from old engraving and from anatomical plates, with deep blacks and a lot of texture. It's one of the few styles where density is part of the point, so plan for a surface that lets the hatching breathe, like a forearm, a thigh or a back, rather than squeezing it into a small spot. On YokoFolio, a dark subject is filed under Dark Art, given together with the drawing style: a macabre scene drawn this way is Dark Art and Illustrative. When the whole piece is built from regular hatching like an old print, the drawing style is Engraving instead.

Sketch keeps the drawing in progress on the skin: loose strokes, visible construction lines, doubled or broken outlines, edges left unfinished on purpose. Illustrative is a finished drawing: clean outlines, closed shapes, shading carried through to the end. Engraving builds all its tone from regular parallel lines and cross-hatching, like an old print, with no smooth grey; Illustrative can use hatching too, but it mixes it with smooth shading, stippling or color, and it feels like a storybook or a poster rather than a copperplate. None of the three aims at a photograph's illusion: that would be Realism. If the drawing is finished and outlined, with shading that isn't only print-style hatching, it's Illustrative.