Tattoo Cover-Ups: An Illustrated Guide
A brief introduction to help you navigate the often-murky world of tattoo coverups
(from an artist who loves doing them!)
Our goal, in the following illustrations, is to coverup the “cat” tattoo on this wrist. The slides below illustrate some bad options, and explains what would be a good option.
The coverup design is too small and the wrong shape, leaving parts of the old tattoo still visible, peeking out from the edges of the new tattoo.
Some light colored inks will obscure the old tattoo at first, but will not remain opaque after they heal, exposing the old tattoo again.
Even though the old tattoo is covered, this new tattoo looks terrible.
The new tattoo effectively covers the old one, while also looking good as a stand-alone image.
Special requests:
~ Covering NAMES ~
A name tattooed on top of another name would look like a jumbled mess!
The old name (“Jolene”) is covered effectively by the rose, and the new name (“Dolly”) was added elsewhere in the design. This format may not work for all coverups, but did work well in this example.
No matter what you need covered up:
Thanks for reading!