Not all girls want girly tattoos. In fact, just calling a tattoo girly can be enough to make a woman who loves that tattoo design think twice about getting it. While men and women enjoy the benefits and pleasures of classic tattoo motivations such as memorial tattoos, military tattoos, biker tattoos and a variety of animal tattoo designs and botanical tattoo designs, the same tattoo design can look completely different on a woman than it does on a man.
If you want to make sure that your tattoo design fits you perfectly, then it may pay off to make that tattoo design somewhat gender specific. While you do not have to forgo any tattoo design that makes you happy, making it fit your skin tone and your body shape can dramatically enhance your tattoo and take it from a work of art to being a truly living and breathing part of the story of your body and your life.
Feminine tattoo designs tend to work with the lines of the female body. Sometimes this has to do with tattoo placement, and sometimes it has to do with the way that the design fits the area of the body. For example, masculine tattoos tend to run parallel to the lines of the body, such as tribal tattoos like armbands that can emphasize the size of the biceps or the calf muscles. However, feminine tattoos are generally placed to elongate the body, such as climbing vines, fairies with extended wings or flying butterflies. Even more abstract feminine tattoos, such as tribal art, still tend to be more stretched vertically than horizontally so that the tattoo appears to flow with the body. Rounder and more horizontal tattoos are often placed in areas that end in a point, such as at the small of the back or near the center of the pelvic region, or in areas that might be enhanced by appearing broader, such as the shoulders or the nape of the neck.
While placement can play a major part in how feminine a tattoo design appears, the biggest distinction between distinctly male and distinctly female tattoos is almost always in the color palate. Feminine tattoos, even when they are identical in design to masculine tattoos, tend to have a softer color palette. They may contain brighter and more blended colors, and tend to be far less blocky and contain much less black than masculine versions of the same design. Furthermore, feminine tattoo designs are often drawn with the intent of having only thin lines separating the details or using only color to distinguish one area of the design from another. Tattoo artists who specialize in feminine tattoo designs and feminine tattoo imagery are often able to create incredibly realistic designs largely because they have learned to tattoo without the black lines. If you want a particularly feminine tattoo, it is wise to have a stencil and a color guide with you when you go to get your tattoo so that the artist can use these as a guide and will not have to rely as much on the black outlines that characterize many tattoo designs.
There are many types of tattoo design that are distinctly feminine regardless of how they are portrayed. For example, many women get the female sign, a circle with a cross extending from the bottom of the circle, to represent their pride in being a woman, their faith in the women's movement or just the importance of womanhood to themselves and to society and culture. Getting the female sign tattooed on your body is a wonderful way to fully accept yourself and your strengths as a woman. It is nearly always a feminine tattoo, but there are men who also get this tattoo to express their love for women's physical or emotional or who are conflicted about their gender identity. However, the female sign tattoo design is nearly always the undisputed territory of proud tattooed women. Another common theme in feminine tattoos is the popularity of symbolic scripts. In the past decade, using Chinese symbols to indicate traits of value has become popular with both genders. Feminine versions of this trend tend to have more ornate lettering or additional decoration accompanying the symbol itself. As Chinese symbols have become nearly ubiquitous (and as many celebrities, such as Britney Spears, have been snared into getting symbols that ultimately do not mean quite what they thought they did, raising the profile of Chinese symbol tattoos in a somewhat negative manner), many tattoo aficionados have moved on to other symbolic scripts, such as Tibetan or Polynesian symbol tattoos.
If you are a woman considering getting a tattoo, there is no reason to restrict yourself to feminine tattoo designs. However, if you are having trouble deciding what tattoo design you want or where to get your tattoo, then factoring in various attributes of typically feminine tattoo design may help you make your decision.
