Tribal
What is Tribal?
FAQ
Tribal
Tribal
Tribal
What is Tribal?
FAQ
Tribal
Tribal works black masses, points and symmetry, borrowed from Pacific art without the systems of meaning behind it.
Tribal, in the sense the word has been used in the West since the 1990s, means a vocabulary of black pointed shapes, symmetrical curves and solid fills, borrowed from Polynesian, Bornean and African art and then largely cut loose from it. No gradients, no color, no depth: everything reads through the outlines and the rhythm of the gaps. It had an enormous run through the 1990s and 2000s, then a recent comeback among a generation rediscovering it through graphic design and fashion. It shouldn't be confused with the traditions it borrows from — Māori tā moko, Polynesian tatau, Marquesan patutiki — which are living practices with their own rules and their own keepers.
On YokoFolio, pick the style Tribal and then your city, and widen the radius if you need to. Good tribal work is judged at the edges: clean points, decisive curves, even gaps, solid black with no holes. Check too whether the artist tells the difference between Western tribal and the Pacific traditions — a portfolio that mixes everything without distinction is a bad sign. And if you're covering an old tribal piece, look for someone who shows successful cover-ups.
The word covers very different things. Filipino (batok), with geometric motifs hand-tapped into the skin. Hawaiian (kākau), in bands and checkerboards. Samoan (tatau), whose pe'a covers from waist to knees. Aztec, drawn from the codices and from carved stone. The African traditions, more often scarified than tattooed. Western tribal of the 1990s pulled a vocabulary of shapes out of all that, without the systems of meaning: they are not the same thing.
It's the return of tribal among a generation that rediscovered it through graphic design and fashion rather than through counterculture. It keeps the black masses, the points and the symmetries, but embraces abstraction: no borrowed cultural references at all, invented shapes, sometimes vector or pixelated edges. It's what most recent searches are actually about, and it overlaps heavily with cyber-tribal and cyber-sigilism.
There are three routes, and none of them erases anything. Extend it: fold it into a larger piece, neotribal or blackwork, that absorbs it. Transform it into a deliberate solid black shape, which often gives the best result. Lighten it with a laser over several sessions before considering anything else — that's slow, and it doesn't give you new skin. A dense black fill can't be covered with a fine design: show photos to an artist who does cover-ups regularly, and they'll tell you straight what's possible.