Tattoo Johnny Tattoos & Tattoo Design Guide: Two Ways to Know if You Have a Quality Tattoo Stencil

Two Ways to Know if You Have a Quality Tattoo Stencil

Tuesday 24th of March 2009 11:09:57 AM [Add To This Article]

Imagine this. You walk into a tattoo studio to get your first tattoo. Youâ€™ve spent hours thinking about the tattoo and deciding what tattoo will be the best for you. In fact, you actually tried out several different designs as temporary tattoos to determine which tattoo would be the absolute best tattoo design possible for you. As a result of all this research, your anticipation has been building and building for quite some time. You know that you have picked the perfect tattoo, and to help your tattoo artist out, you actually traced that tattoo off of a printed sheet of paper after you found it and labeled the colors in the drawing. You love your beautiful tattoo design, and you cannot wait to have it on your body and to show it off to everyone you meet. You hand over your tracing, which tattoo artists call a tattoo stencil, and the work begins. A while later, the tattoo artist tells you that you are done and can go check out your new tattoo in the mirror. You run to the mirror with excitement, eager to see your beautiful new tattoo. When you get there, your heart falls. Sure, the tattoo is nice, but it certainly is not what you had in mind. The colors are not quite right for one, and the tattoo design that you picked out had a lot more detail and depth. You try to put a good face on things (after all, this is permanent so you might as well learn to like it), but inside you are a little disappointed at the way your tattoo turned out. You walk out of the studio sadly, and mark off your tattoo experience as a disheartening one rather than a wonderful one.

The key to your disappointment is simpler than you may imagine. While the tendency is to hold the tattoo artist responsible for your disappointing tattoo design, in reality the responsibility is at least partially yours. You provided the artist with a poor quality tattoo stencil, and that lack of quality led to a tattoo that was not at all what you had been hoping for. If you are considering getting a tattoo, make sure that your tattoo stencil is of good quality and gives your tattoo artist the information that they need to make your tattoo look just like you want it to.

Here are two things that are vital to the quality of a tattoo stencil:

1. The stencil should be the original artist stencil.

Original artistsâ€™ stencils have more detail than any other stencil, and the artists themselves can put every important aspect of the tattoo design into the stencil to insure that the end look of your tattoo design is identical or very nearly identical once it is completed to the original drawing. If a stencil is simply traced or even freehanded from an image by another artist, then vital details that can make or break the drawing will nearly always escape notice simply because the secondary artist is not as familiar with the work as the original artist. Also, lines tend to become wavy and fine details get blurry and ambiguous. In the end, a secondary or tertiary stencil will simply leave your tattoo artist unable to reproduce the exact look of the original work. It is a simple matter to get stencils from the source, and there are many services that provide them. Just be sure that wherever you get your stencil assures that the stencils come from the original artist and with the artistâ€™s approval.

2. The stencil should come with a color reference.

A stencil that is just an outline is not all that helpful if you want to be sure to get the tattoo design look that you fell in love with when you picked it out. A good quality stencil will come with a color reference that will help your tattoo artist get the exact shading, detail and depth of the original artwork. While every artist is different, bringing a color reference with you to accompany the stencil will help your tattoo artist get the exact look that you are hoping for with your tattoo design. Do not ever just bring the color reference, however, because without an accompanying tattoo stencil there will not be any lines or details for the tattoo artist to use as a guide.

Getting a quality tattoo stencil is vital to the ultimate appearance of your tattoo design. Be sure that your tattoo stencil meets these two important requirements before you use it to get tattooed.