The Dark Knight in watercolor. This is bad ass. The matte finish style of Batman’s suit can be a difficult texture to pull off in tattoo, but this watercolor effect captures it strongly and then adds the correct planes and angles in detailing the DC hero’s mask. The bottom image bleed of ink looks fantastic contrasting the clarity of pointy ears and shadow, while the negative space eye technique is cleverly etched to show a glimpse of Bruce’s duality.

This is a fine tattoo using watercolor ink to provide space, scale and balance to a heavily negative space chest tattoo. The artist smartly opted to outline the hands in black line, adding strength to the stylized heart and making it the focal point for the entire piece. The depth of shade detail in both red and black halves of the fill color fashions tremendous depth.

Now, this is unique. The artist has crafted a strongly etched light bulb person then applied a rainbow’s worth of vivid watercolor as a contrasting fill to the crumpled suit and tie. They’ve also made a good fist of filling the tattoo out along the calf with cool paint elements such as smudging, spill lines and ink splashes. This allows the placement to become a strength of the art instead of just a spot to color in. 

Watercolor fill in this realistic heart completely changes the tattoo and transitions the piece away from a tried and tested blackwork or gray scale shade tattoo. The red color is vivid and breathtakingly effective – it really pops against the dark heart image. Also applaud the choice to avoid supplementary shading or border and go with the heart outline alone.

This watercolor wave tattoo is actually too busy. The painter style mix of layered color takes away from the rolling wave image and leaves it a bit of a mess, and muddles the shadowy cloud dragon. Some black line needlework to give the piece structure would help, as would more clearly defined color patterns.