Japanese

Koi fish. Cherry Blossoms. Dragons. This is a rich tattoo style with a deep history, and it's been in popular demand for quite some time. The designs are very flat — two-dimensional, almost like a textile. They can also be done in full color or black and gray. Japanese themed tattoos frequently using Koi fish, cherry blossoms, Buddha, lotus, dragon’s, war dogs, samurai’s or geisha’s are used in combination to tell a story as well as create a piece of timeless art. This type of tattoo is frequently very meticulous. This is a tattoo style that could cover the entire body. The work is prudently planned out ahead of time before the work on any part of the body begins. I have included some photos below! Enjoy!

Photo Realistic

Photo realistic is one of my favorite tattoo types as it looks like it could come alive at any second. Usually, photo realistic tattoos are represented by portraits or true to life scenes/landscapes that showcase the fine line detail of a photograph or painting. These tattoos mimic photography, and if that isn't mind-blowing then I don't know what is. Photo realism is more of a general term. As I stated above, it can be portrait; which we have already gone over, it can be bio-mechanical which we will go over on a future date, so I'm going to try and use examples outside of that realm. Some important aspects to these photo realism tattoos are the highlights and shadows. Highlights can be made with white ink, lighter ink, or skin breaks where they use the canvas' skin tone as a highlighter. These make a 3 dimensional image appear realistic in a 2 dimensional space. These are also more difficult to tattoo because the human body is made of dips, curves, and budges that can distort images if the artist isn't precise. Below I have included some tattoos that artist have done that represent photo realism (including one of my own tattoos), thanks for reading! :-)

Portrait

Portrait tattoos are one of my favorites. This certain style is my favorite because A tattoo artist has to be extremely skilled in his field to be able to convey a person’s likeness on another persons skin. Some of these tattoos are meant to show love, admiration, loss or birth. Portraits are often created using fine line and photo realism tattoo style (both of those styles will have a future blog post about them!). Choose your artist carefully, a photo realistic tattoo takes a high level of skill and talent. Anyone who has looked at portrait tattoos know the majority of these tattoos are the person's loved ones gone wrong. Without a tattoo expertise these portraits end up looking like zombies. These tattoos can range from loved ones to pets, black and grey or color. I have included some portrait tattoos below, I tried to chose some familiar faces!

New School

This post is all about New School tattoos. New school is all about "free styling" and is very different from American Traditional. New school is all about new ideas and creating new patterns with combinations of graffiti and hip hop influences. New school tattoos most noticeable feature is the use of very bright neon colors. Other attributes to new school tattooing is bright saturated inks, large “strokes”, vivid pop of colors and cartoon-like shapes and volumes. There isn’t one clear style, or “common” subjects but you’ll unquestionably know a new school tattoo when you see it. New school is all about colors you can’t find in nature and extreme 3D, almost graffiti-like shading, and Heavy outline, like cartoons and graffiti’s.
For me, I really appreciate new school tattoos for their artwork, creativity, and uniqueness. I have seen so many distinctive new school tattoos over the years and I have seen them take off in popularity.
I have included some images of new school tattoos that show you the range of subjects it can create.

Slow Motion

I was going to wait to post this video until about half way through my blog but I couldn't help myself. This video absolutely amazes me every time I watch it. Some of you may have seen videos similar to this but I found this eye opening to look at what is really happening when you are getting tattooed. This video is slow motion tattooing. For me, this really makes me appreciate a tattoo artist and what they can do and their precision. This also makes me a little sick to my stomach. To think about people putting their bodies through this, amazes me.. But then I think about how many hours I've sat in the chair and have been tattooed. My longest session was 6 hours for one tattoo. 6 hours of this? No thanks. It really doesn't seem bad until you put it into slow motion.

American Traditional

The first tattoo style that I am going to discuss in this blog is Traditional! These tattoos are known for their color pallet, clean lines, and bold black outlines! This was actually one of the first couple tattoo styles to come about. This started when tattoo artist had a portfolio of flash tattoos to keep up with demand of people wanting tattoos. Flash tattoos were predrawn up images that clients could pick from and get without hassle (Some artist and tattoo shops still do these to this day). This was to let artist keep up since everyone always had new tattoo designs they wanted which took a lot more time to draw, make, and tattoo. American Traditional can also be distinguished by its specific imagery back then with its pin ups, patriotic symbols such as the American flag and eagle, and other designs. These designs are simple and gave the artist more opportunities to help more clients when this first came about. These days American Traditional has changed slightly. The most common tattoos in this category and style are roses, skulls, daggers, panthers, patriotic symbols, pin ups, and other images. This tattoo style can be seen from a distance without trouble of knowing what it is or having too much detail. With this post I have included some American traditional tattoos!

Welcome!

Good Morning, Everyone! It is 5:02am as I start this blog and I figured I would start my first post off with a little about myself! My name is Paige Cunningham, I'm 21 years old and attend/commute to Bradley University in Peoria! Not too far from Peoria is Pekin (about 20 minutes), the place I grew up and love. Most people (for some odd reason) want to get out of their hometown and move, but that's not my case. Ever since I got into high school I decided that my dream job would to be working at Caterpillar Inc. in Peoria, the headquarters of CAT. For some reason I was interested in being a part of the CAT team and wanted to pursue my career there since I have had high influence from most of my family working there. Along came Junior year of high school where I did my research and decided on Bradley University, a way to get my foot in the door at CAT but still be close to home. Unlike most people, I chose where I wanted to work first instead of what I wanted to do.. and that's where my pursuit started. Through college I decided on my major, marketing, something I was interested in doing AND could do for CAT. My social media concentration was and is purely for my enjoyment. I am a social media junky, I love keeping up on the news and seeing what other people have to say and what’s going on in their life! Here I am, senior year of College and I have now been working at Caterpillar for a year! I absolutely love what I do and love this company.

As for my interest.. I love tattoos, heavy metal music, cats, duke basketball, Packers, and engagement rings. My father and I have been Duke basketball fans for about 10 years and I am a big college basketball fan (Go Blue Devils! Boo Tar Heels!). Recently, specifically the last 3 years, I have picked up a love for the NFL, in particular the Green Bay Packers! My boyfriend has been a fan since he was a child and I supported him and now consider myself a cheese head! I love traveling up to Green Bay and watching the games and this year we are even going to the Thanksgiving Packers vs Bears game to watch Brett Favres jersey get retired (and be in the Lambeau leap zone!). Music and concerts are another passion of mine. I have seen about 80-100 bands, mostly heavy music including some big names such as Slipknot (my most recent), Three days Grace, Motionless in White, ADTR, and obviously a lot more. The last odd interest/passion I have is engagement rings. I have been with my boyfriend for almost 4 years now and we just started looking at them for fun our first year of dating, which turned into me making a twitter account full of information and pictures of engagement rings. I actually got paid to tweet for some NY companies that sold engagement rings, I would RT and tweet about their business and their sales, I've had this account since December of 2013 I believe. I have stopped doing advertising for companies as it took up a lot of time and now just post pictures of rings for people to see (approximately 15,000 followers).

I could talk about a few things forever, tattoos and engagement rings. My love for tattoos started when I was around 14 when I actually got my first tattoo. Once my parents found out, I was grounded for 8 months (mom and dad were not happy!). From there on I had continued my tattoo obsession and now have around 10 tattoos, not too many but enough to satisfy me for the moment. Even after my young exposure to tattoos my parents continued to ask me why I loved tattoos so much, honestly I still cannot answer that question, I just do. Now, my parents have a couple tattoos and support me in my decisions of what I want and where I want them. I am an advocate of being smart when choosing your tattoo and place of ink. I don’t think its right you can be judged as unprofessional for having tattoos, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles! Always chose places you can hide, especially in a professional environment. I hope you all enjoy my blog that I am starting, I'm going to post each week a new style of tattooing, what they are, how they do it, some history or background, and some good photographs of examples! I hope you enjoying reading each week and enjoy Tattoo Nirvana! :-)