Experts at Inked Mag say there are a number of ways to tell if a tattoo is a success or not. One of them is saturation. A good tattoo should have fully saturated blacks, colors, and shading. When it heals, there shouldn't be gaps or shapes in the design that indicate it wasn’t filled in properly.
Additionally, the lines should be crisp, straight, and consistent throughout the tattoo. Wonky strokes are a huge indication of an inexperienced artist.
Next up is composition. It relates to the flow of different elements within a tattoo. The components should fit together seamlessly, and it takes an experienced artist to understand how to arrange a design.
How a tattoo heals is also a significant indication of good versus bad execution. If a tattoo scars, blows out, or straight-up falls out of the skin—it's bad.
A tattoo should also have a variety of tones in order for it to appear multidimensional. If it has poor contrast, it will look flat and washed out.
You probably want people to look at your tattoo and know exactly what it is or what it says—unless it's a purposefully done optical illusion.
However, tattoos can also be "bad" on purpose. The style is called ignorant tattoos and the term makes perfect sense—the word ignorant means lacking knowledge, awareness and sophistication, and that's probably what the haters of the genre would say to describe it.
Having gained popularity with celebrities like Miley Cyrus and singer-turned-tattooist Brooke Candy, these designs embrace humor and irony and defy the traditional notions of what tattooing should be. Some love their tongue in cheek and DIY aesthetic while others think they're crass.
Ignorant tattoos are often simple, mainly done in black linework with little or no shading. Cartoonish in nature, many of them also mimic doodles or freehand drawings. Tattoo artist Andrea @nolseytattoo told Stories & Inked hers "come from the type of media I’ve consumed all my life."
"I've watched the Looney Tunes and [other] old time-y cartoons. Growing up my father was very into comics and drawing cartoon-y characters himself too. So when I started tattooing it kind of made sense to me to look into ignorant style tattoos as it does have similarities with what I’ve always drawn."
For Andrea, ignorant style tattooing "comes hand in hand with the way contemporary art in general is evolving." As broader trends change, so do tattoos and what people want to put on their bodies.
Text in ignorant style tattoos tends to look like scribbles on a post-it note. It's deliberately messy, uneven, has mistakes, words are crossed out or they're in all caps.
