Cover up tattoo design

Hi there,

Recently I got the question from someone who wanted to cover up an old tattoo.
The design was a faded dragon or horse or something like that.
Normally I don't design cover-up tattoos, but for this time I agreed on turning it into a maori shoulder tattoo, with some nice fills and curles.

First I made a template with an example of the existing design and the space I should cover in total.


The customer wanted a circle in the middle and some curly maori ferns around it.
Total size of the existing design was 2,5 cm wide and 6 cm high. The cover up had to be somewhere around 14 cm high and 10 cm wide.

I print the template on A4 size paper with all the lines in really lightgrey, so the lines are not that visible.
The first sketch was just a try-out to see how I had to work around the existing tattoo.


It took me around an hour to do this one.


I scanned it and mailed it to my customer who wanted a bit more detail and more curves.

The second sketch worked out better and the shape was done.
After some e-mailcontact on the fills we agreed to keep it simple with some basic lines and full black fills.




Next time I will try to explain how to make a tattoo design ready for a tattoo shop, by creating a linedrawing for a stencil.

Till then!

Regards, Mark