Almost no matter what you have tattooed on your body, as long as it’s not badly scarred or just solid black, you can cover it up. Not every tattoo artist is at the same skill level for cover up work, though, so research your artist well before you choose one. There are many common misunderstandings about cover up work that have people keeping old junky tattoos that they dislike even when they don’t have to. There’s two types of cover ups, the first is redoing an old tattoo to make it look new again, and the other is completely changing what you originally had with a new image or design.
When you have an old, faded tattoo, even if it was solid black, you can make it look as if it was just done and perfect. A nice sharp outline will give any tattoo new life, and help clean up any blurring of the old outline into the surrounding skin. The old faded black can be redone with black on top of it, and depending on how faded it is, color can be a good way to add more life. Color can cover black, despite the common myths that nothing but more black will. Sometimes giving the redone tattoo a colored background to really make it stand out also adds to the new look.
If you need to get a tattoo covered, as many people unfortunately do, it can be done. The main guidelines to changing a tattoo from one design to another are:
1. You need to make the new tattoo at least 50% larger than the old one.
2. You need to change the focal point of the new tattoo away from the old focal point.
3. You need to be working on a tattoo that is fully healed and not badly scarred.
These guidelines give the new tattoo artist room to trick the viewers eye into looking at a new focal point, and taking their eye away from certain points of the old tattoo that need to be covered. If your first tattoo has large amount of dark shading, a new bright focal point will be made to attract attention there. This is why making the tattoo a bit bigger is usually a must. As stated earlier, color can cover black in certain situations, and this can help so much when trying to give dimension to a new tattoo.
Do remember that this new tattoo might take more than one sit in order to be finished. Some cover ups need to be done in layers, in order to fully blend the ink of the new one into the skin and ink of the old. It is also crucial to make sure you choose a design/image this time that you can live with for life, as a second cover up is almost impossible. That is another reason why the new artist should be chosen carefully.
