Cover ups are serious business. They are a great way to get rid of regret, wether it's the memories of that Vegas trip when you got married by Elvis and got your future ex husband's name tattooed on you or wether it's a souvenir from your f*cked up teenage years experimenting with sewing needle and india ink tattoos! Emotional regret is a different story!!
Cover ups don't have to be so complicated. Any quality artist SHOULD be able to cover a tattoo. The "normal" way to cover a tattoo is to use a color that is darker than the colors used in the tattoo to be covered. Most artists (the mediocre ones) would have chosen a design which was mostly BLACK to cover this tribal, like another tribal or a mountain gorilla or... When in reality, a color that is the same value of the tattoo to be covered will work to blend it into the new design or to cover it. The tattoo in picture is greyish... a dolphin would have easily covered this, leaving plenty of clear skin to put a rainbow coming out of it's ass and not have the colors muddied up by the grey tattoo.
If you look at photo number one, the tattoo looks dark on the skin because the only color to contrast it is her skin color, but if you took a blue ball point pen and drew a line on the tattoo, you would see that the pen is darker than the tattoo and you would know that you have more options than you think!
Tattoo colors in their bottles look thick, dark and dense... they are much like tempera paint, or poster paints, the difference is in the surface they to be applied to. On paper, the color will be opaque, that is to say "solid" because the surface is not as porous as skin is so on paper, these colors can cover spots or patches which are dark. IN the skin, the colors go in transparent so there's no way you can cover a freckle with yellow, or pink or anything lighter in value than that freckle. They will show through, some darker scars will too... birthmarks, the same... GET IT?
how bout now?
In this tattoo I (Art) used shades of battle ship grey and watered down black to do the "base coat" of the tattoo... creating a foundation which would make it easier to add lighter colors around those areas to create depth.
If you need cover up work, think of the images that you like. It's up to us to make it cover that ugliness. You should be open minded because NOT all images will cover all tattoos, for example, a bright yellow happy face would never cover this grey tribal tattoo. The only other option, if your tattoo is super dark, besides tattooing a big black patch is laser treatments... which can be used to lighten the tattoo in order to have more options for cover up designs, or to get rid of it all together.
If anyone can do it, we can. Got one to do really soon, the clown who did it originally, knows who he is. Have a few ideas in mind just in CASE Your original idea doesn't work.
Picture borrowed from Coastalliving.com
