Have you heard the pervasive, ignorant idea that color tattoos aren’t for people with melanated skin? It’s an idea perpetuated by tattoo artists across the nation and it’s simply not true.
In my experience, I’ve found that most artists who say things like that have little to no experience with color or white ink on melanated skin & are trying to cover their own butts. I get it, no one wants to look inexperienced or like an idiot, but honesty is number one in my book and that’s how I started to learn to tattoo on diverse skin tones. Let’s chat about a few important lessons I’ve learned by tattooing melanated skin.
Early in my tattoo career, a client with a deep skin tone asked me if yellow would show up on their skin. I said I didn’t know but I’d be willing to try and I wouldn’t charge them for that tattoo. We did a few small tattoos that day, and I did the yellow one for free. He came in some months later and the tattoo disappeared completely. Lesson number one, be honest and don’t charge for expertise you don’t have. Lesson number two: black outlines matter.
Later, I saw that red showed up well in many skin tones (red can have a cool or warm lean, but is often neutral), and that blue ink turned ashy-gray in warmly melanated skin. I started using my knowledge from my former life as a makeup artist and chose ink colors based on the warmth or coolness of skin tone and saw more successful color heals. Lesson three: skin undertone can dictate what colors work best.
As a nerd for color, I watched a few science videos about what happens to colors of the rainbow as you travel deeper under water and applied that knowledge to my clients. Warm colors have a long wavelengths (Red has the longest) and cool colors have shorter wavelengths (Violet is the shortest). Warm colors stay more true to color as you travel deeper underwater, while the cool colors quickly all look the same color as everything they’re surround by. I inferred that when deeply melanated skin tone heals over color ink, less light is reflected back, which means colors with long wavelengths show up more true to the original ink color. Lesson four: long wavelength colors change less when melanated skin heals over it (red versus cool purple)
After a couple years of tattooing, I attended a tattoo seminar and learned that colors with a higher chroma appear more saturated and vibrant in the skin. I had noticed in my own work that muted colors healed pretty poorly in skin with more melanin, so I started using my most vibrant high chroma ink colors, for better color visibility. Lesson five: melanated skin benefits from high chroma tattoo ink colors (fuschia versus baby pink, grass green versus sage green).
One summer, while tattooing at several different conventions, I was sought out by several melanated clients for color work. I didn’t think my Instagram profile seemed robust enough to quantify a draw for melanated skin clientele, but my honest attitude and sparse examples that involved a good bit of scrolling were enough to convince people to book. Lesson six: people with melanated skin have to do way more research to find qualified artists.
I recently attended another educational tattoo seminar where tattoo artist, Kevin LaRoy shared about tattooing melanated skin. He dropped the knowledge bomb that there are currently over 50,000 tattoo artists in the USA and while making a list of top 50 best tattoo artists for melanated skin, he struggled to find enough qualified artists. Lesson seven: more tattoo artists need to tattoo melanated skin — period.
And now? I can’t imagine having to trust a kid with barely any experience to give me permanent body art, but I’m so grateful a lot of people did trust me. That trust helped me draw my own conclusions and develop my own set of best practices for tattooing all skin tones.
I am by no means an expert on tattooing melanated skin, but I’m honest about my experience, invested in my clients, and committed to growing and learning. My biggest struggle currently, is taking good photos of my work on melanated skin. I struggle to take good photos in general, but I’m going to figure it out - for everyone’s sake! I’d like to share a few of my favorite colorful tattoos on melanated skin that I’ve done in not so distant past.
Color + Melanin Gallery:
