We’ve all seen it: tattoos that look smudged or blurry; lines that bleed into each other and can leave a tattoo looking unprofessional at best, and completely ruined at worst. This tattoo complication is known as “blowout” and it is no one’s friend.

Read on to learn more about tattoo blowout, how it looks on skin and why it occurs. Explore options available to replace, repair, or remove the issue of tattoo blowout.  

What is tattoo blowout?  

Blowout is when pieces look to have blurred, smudged, or ran, because the tattoo artist has used the tattoo machine in an improper or inefficient way. 

While anyone that has examined a friend’s DIY tattoos is probably familiar with what blowout looks like, many people are still unclear as to what causes this unsightly blurring in supposedly professionally applied tattoo ink.  

While there are numerous factors that can increase the odds of a blowout, inexperience is responsible for 90% of blown-out tattoos.  

This is not to say that an experienced tattoo artist is immune from blowouts, but they can greatly limit the risk of occurrence of a tattoo design ruined by blowout. 

 

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What are the causes of tattoo blowout?  

Heavy hands or the wrong angle  

Pushing ink too deep into the skin is the leading cause of blowout. A heavy-handed artist may apply the ink using too much pressure which will lead to ink absorbing into unintended tissue and bleeding into neighboring areas.  

On the other end of the spectrum, if an artist doesn’t penetrate deep enough and the tattoo ink is applied to the upper layers of skin blowout can also occur, as the inks bleeds into the surrounding skin.  

An inexperienced artist (more often than not) may also apply the machine at the wrong angle, causing the ink to bleed into surrounding tissue and create a blowout. This happens more often with black ink than color.