Filler Tattoo Ideas for the Gaps in a Sleeve

What a filler tattoo means

Filler is a job description rather than a motif. It is the small piece that goes into the bare patch left between larger tattoos, and almost anything small can do the job: every design on this page, from a rosebud to a paper plane, was drawn at the size and weight of one. What a filler says is mostly what its neighbours say, since its work is to make a collection look spaced on purpose rather than abandoned halfway.

It is not the same thing as a background. The smoke, cloud and water that bind a Japanese or black-and-grey sleeve touch every piece and turn them into one picture; a filler touches nothing and keeps each piece separate. That is why fillers belong to arms built one visit at a time, the scattered American traditional arm and its present-day descendant, the patchwork sleeve, and have little place in a sleeve designed as a single composition.

Most small flash still carries its old meaning. Swallows and nautical stars come from sailors' sheets and read as homecoming; cherries come from the pin-up and rockabilly side and read as flirtation. Two need thought before they fill anything. A web in the crook of the elbow has been read as prison time in several countries, and the triangle of three dots here is the Chicano sign for mi vida loca, my crazy life, widely taken across the United States as a prison mark when it sits on the hand or beside the eye.

Some fillers are built to stretch. The three swallows on a curve, the cluster of stars and the burst of sparkles are made of repeated units, so an artist can add one, drop one or spread them out to fit a long or short gap. A single skull or rosebud has one size that works, and the space has to be found for it.

Where the design comes from

Filler is as old as the collected arm. Flash sheets on the walls of port-town shops offered rows of small designs with a price painted beside each, and sailors on shore leave bought swallows, stars, daggers and cherries a few dollars at a time, fitting each one wherever the last shop had left room. Norman Collins, known as Sailor Jerry, tattooed in the Hotel Street district of Honolulu during and after the Second World War, and his flash fixed the heavy outline and flat primary colour that seven of the fillers here still use. Recent patchwork arms made the leftover a category of its own.

Choosing yours

• Measure the gap before choosing the subject. A long narrow strip between two pieces wants an upright shape, the dagger, the feather, the lightning bolt or the flame; a round hole wants the cherries, the skull or the ghost; the ditch of the elbow, or a corner where three tattoos meet, wants a fan such as the web. Hold the flash against a photograph of the empty space, because the silhouette decides whether a filler looks planted or squeezed in.
• Match the weight of what surrounds it more than the style. The stick-and-poke heart or the fine-line moon among heavy traditional pieces looks like an error rather than a contrast, and the solid black sparkle beside delicate linework looks like a blot.
• Put fillers in last. The gaps take their true shape only once the large pieces are finished and healed.

Common questions