Realism in tattooing is older than most accounts suggest. Sailors in the nineteenth century commissioned portraits of loved ones, and prison tattooing in multiple traditions produced recognisable likenesses centuries before the electric machine. The idea of putting realistic depictions on skin is not a late-twentieth-century invention.
New school is the most maligned of the major tattoo styles. Some of that reputation is earned; some of it comes from a reflex against cartoon imagery in a craft tradition that has come to prefer fine-art references. Either way, the style is also one of the most technically demanding in the tattooing repertoire, and the work of (…)
Neo-traditional is in a period of consolidation. The experimental energy of the 2000s and early 2010s has given way to a more established set of conventions, and a recognisable neo-traditional aesthetic now exists that an artist can work inside without feeling they are reinventing anything. This has produced a great deal of competent work (…)
American traditional is a craft tradition in the oldest sense: a body of knowledge passed from one person to the next, refined by working conditions, preserved by repetition, and judged by whether the work still looks right in forty years. The designs that were good in 1935 are the same designs that are good now, for the same reasons.
Norman Keith Collins (1911–1973), best known as “Sailor Jerry,” was a U.S.-based tattoo artist who worked primarily in Honolulu and became a key bridge between early 20th‑century American flash tattooing and later “tattoo renaissance” practice that treated tattooing as a serious craft with international artistic references.
Tattoo styles are shared visual rules, methods, and histories. But there is no single, universally accepted taxonomy. Some labels describe an aesthetic, some describe a palette, some are fundamentally technique-based, and some are culture-bound practices where meaning, permission, and protocol are inseparable from the design.