Color tattoo - advantages and disadvantages

Colored tattooing is one of the three main stylistic branches of tattoo development. It includes a range of styles such as old school, color realism, watercolor, new school, neotraditional, and many others.

As the name suggests, colored tattooing is based on working with colored pigments, with a wide range of technical execution options available. These can be solid simple colors, as in old school, or smooth gradient transitions in color realism, or bright and sometimes even acidic colors in new school tattooing, or delicate, almost weightless works in watercolor.

Color tattoo features

Application of colored tattoos takes more time, as a larger number of pigments are used and requires a special level of precision and professionalism from the tattoo artist. Using color in tattooing opens up new facets of creative self-expression, allowing for vivid, saturated images or even photorealistic portraits. However, colored tattoos require more careful maintenance than black ones, in order to preserve clarity and color saturation. To maintain clarity and brightness of the colors, it is necessary to avoid direct sunlight and tanning of the tattooed skin area even after complete healing. It is also recommended to have the tattoo corrected every five years to maintain brightness and color saturation.

Tattoo artists often use black outlines to provide additional contrast to tattoo elements and to "restrain" colors. Colored tattoos are more difficult to remove with laser technology, as there are pigments that modern lasers cannot break down, so it is important to keep this in mind and not expect an easy separation from the tattoo in the future.

Advantages of colored tattooing include a bright design and a large number of available styles. Disadvantages include higher demands for the artist's professionalism, a longer application process, more significant fading that requires more frequent correction, possible allergies to some colored pigments, and some pigments being non-removable by laser.