How to ‘Try On’ Your Tattoo Before Buying It

Choosing a tattoo should be a methodical process. The biggest mistake you can possibly make is to walk into a tattoo parlor, browse through their artwork for a few minutes, and then site down in the chair to get inked.

You need to take your time. Decide what your tattoo should mean to you, decide which types of design styles you like the best, determine what colors work the best for you, etc. That's one of the reasons I like tattoo finders so much: they let you you look through and 'try' thousands of tattoo designs before committing to one. But looking isn't the same thing as having, is it?

For that reason, you might want to 'try your tattoo on' before you actually commit to inking in permanently. There are a few ways to go about this, but here are my tips for doing so:

First, choose your tattoo's location. If you have an idea of your style, great; but if not, don't worry about it. Just try to get a feel for whether you want (for example) a hip tattoo, a shoulder tattoo, a lower back tattoo, etc. When you've made this decision, either draw (or have a friend draw) a relevant tattoo on your skin using a medium-tipped colored Sharpie. The design isn't important -- in fact, it could throw you off by forcing you to focus on the design and not the position -- what is important is the location and size. Keep looking at that Sharpie tattoo over the next few days, and see if you change your mind on position or size. Keep tweaking this until you get it right.

Once you have a design and a location in mind, have your friend draw the design in fine-tipped colored Sharpies. Personally, I think you should get as realistic as you can at this point, and you can do this by doing what the tattoo artists do.

1. Get yourself some professional transfer paper. This is the paper that tattoo artists use to transfer a design from a book to your skin.
2. Trace the design onto the transfer paper. Using a lightbox will make this step much easier, but of course, they cost money!
3. Transfer the design onto your skin with the transfer paper.
4. Pick up a box of fine-tipped, multicolor Sharpies, and have your friend draw and fill in the traced image.

Once you've done that, keep looking at your tattoo over the next several days. Think of this as a little test drive that you can take to ensure that your chosen design is right for you. Really, it sounds simple, but it's pretty powerful. You can see, with a high degree of accuracy and realism, what that tattoo is going to look like on your skin. If you don't like, just scrub really hard and try again with a clean canvas!

Here are some transfer paper examples:

And here are some lightbox examples:

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