Temples, housing, totems worshipping every creature from the Aztec Eagle to the Feathered Serpent deity – were central to the Aztec tribe’s of life. Nearly all their grayscale shading tattoo has links to the stonework that underpinned the remarkable culture of the fierce Aztec people. 

11. Traditional Aztec Tribal Design

A nicely etched shoulder and chest  tattoo. The artist has cleverly used negative space to draw wide lines of black, shadow filled ink to combine and offset the more sharply detailed, intensively gray shadowed skull warrior and traditional Aztec sun.

Modern Aztec style tattoo design utilizes techniques and application styles that are very similar to that of Polynesian body art. The is a strong commitment to pattern, repetition, and the use of negative space in design creation.

12. Unfinished Pieces

I’ve kept this range of unfinished pieces inside the gallery, as they do a wonderful job displaying just how much time, effort, and design skill go into the execution of a bad ass Aztec tattoo idea. These are in various stages of completion – they’ve already taken a huge amount of time and effort, with a hell of a lot more time in the chair left to come. 

Aztec Tattoo FAQs 

Did the Aztecs have tattoos?  

The Aztecs operated under a system of structure, ritual, and superstition that included tattoo as a part of everyday life.   

Aztec tattoo was an important part of their amazing displays of art and culture, developing a variety of intricate designs, patterns and motifs that focused on repetition and development of shape, pattern, and geometric structures.  

The expressive Aztec art style was based upon their passion to avoid death and conquer disaster, which is part of the reason why the Aztecs took sacrifices to an unprecedented level.