Unashamedly stretching over large portions of the body, the colorful inked images are larger than life. Tattoos With Styleįor tattoo artists, the new school style is an incentive to express their best skills with sometimes boundless creativity. Some artists have a preference for a dominant color, but the times of stark black lines are long gone. Color draws the eye, highlights shapes and adds perspective. The most distinctive aspect of this style is the use of rich, solid colors everywhere, and so has a significant role in the new school. The iconographic images encountered in the new school are drawn from familiar subjects found in cartoons, graffiti and popular culture. There is a distinctive 3D imagery and a sense of movement in this style that creates perspective and space - at times, the characters seem to reach right out of the picture. In the 90s, the new school direction became established as a widely popular style of its own featuring an exaggerated subject matter, vivid color palettes and bold outlines. New school tattoos are bold, bright and light. Traditional images like eagles and crosses were replaced with icons from pop culture - cartoon characters, science fiction personas and also representations of contemporary celebrities.

The black and white imagery of the old school was brought to life in rich colors. Pioneers like Marcus Pacheco of the San Francisco Bay Area connected with the graffiti tradition that was becoming more and more visible around the time.

Different stories are told that trace the origin of the style to the work of artists in the 70s and 80s with roots in the counterculture of the West Coast at that time. A short history indeed, for this modern style only emerged a few decades ago and is still evolving into multiple directions.

New school japanese dragon tattoo