InkCraftAnime tattoo designs in cel colour and manga ink
18 original anime tattoos designs drawn for InkCraftBy Uladzimir TumanauUpdated
Anime translates to skin better than it looks: flat colour, one hard-edged shadow and a highlight left as bare skin. Every character here is invented, because a named character belongs to the studio that created it.
Black and grey anime eye tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey anime eye tattoo design
Black and grey anime ghost and woman portrait tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey anime ghost and woman portrait tattoo design
Black and grey anime eye tattoo design: a raised collar Try it on — Black and grey anime eye tattoo design: a raised collar
Black and grey anime wolf and moon tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey anime wolf and moon tattoo design
Color anime samurai tattoo design Try it on — Color anime samurai tattoo design
Black and grey anime samurai tattoo design: a sheathed katana Try it on — Black and grey anime samurai tattoo design: a sheathed katana
Color anime cat tattoo design Try it on — Color anime cat tattoo design
Color anime dragon tattoo design Try it on — Color anime dragon tattoo design
Color anime unicorn tattoo design Try it on — Color anime unicorn tattoo design
Color anime woman portrait and star tattoo design Try it on — Color anime woman portrait and star tattoo design
Color anime cat tattoo design Try it on — Color anime cat tattoo design
Color anime eye tattoo design Try it on — Color anime eye tattoo design
Color anime woman portrait and moon tattoo design Try it on — Color anime woman portrait and moon tattoo design
Black and grey anime abstract tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey anime abstract tattoo design
Color anime woman portrait and demon tattoo design: a red cloud pattern Try it on — Color anime woman portrait and demon tattoo design: a red cloud pattern
Black and grey anime sword tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey anime sword tattoo design
Color anime jellyfish tattoo design Try it on — Color anime jellyfish tattoo design
Black and grey anime woman portrait tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey anime woman portrait tattoo design
18 designs drawn for InkCraft in this style. Tap any one to place it on a photo of your own skin.
These 18 designs, in numbers
- Black and grey
- 8
- Colour
- 10
- Subjects covered
- 14
Cel shading was half a tattoo already
Television anime was painted by hand on celluloid until digital colouring took over around the turn of the century, and the economics of painting thousands of frames shaped the look. Each area got one flat colour, and a figure got a single shadow tone laid down as a hard-edged shape rather than a blend. That is cel shading, and it is close to how tattooing works best: packed colour inside a clean outline is the most stable surface skin can hold, and a shadow with an edge keeps that edge where a soft gradient would drift.
The highlight is where a piece succeeds or fails. The glint in an anime eye is the brightest point in the drawing, and on a body the brightest thing available is skin. A careful artist leaves that glint as a gap in the ink instead of filling it with white, because white pigment softens and can yellow over the years while untouched skin stays exactly as light as the skin around it. The same thinking usually leaves the face unfilled, so the character takes on the wearer's complexion.
Black-and-grey manga work is its own register. Printed manga gets its greys from screentone, sheets of tiny dots cut out and pressed onto the page, and copying that texture on skin means dotwork that needs generous spacing or it fuses into flat grey. The monochrome pieces in this set use solid black shadow and smooth grey instead, which reads as manga ink from arm's length and ages like ordinary shaded black work.
Invented characters in a borrowed idiom
Search for anime tattoos and the results are mostly named characters from named series. Each of those belongs to the studio or publisher that created it, so none of them appears here. What this set draws on instead is the idiom the series share: the oversized eyes, the chibi figure, the wandering ronin under a straw hat, the magical girl, the mecha head, the ghosts and demons of folklore.
Much of that idiom predates television. Osamu Tezuka, whose Astro Boy began as a manga in 1952 and became a weekly series in 1963, took the large, expressive eye from the Disney and Fleischer cartoons he admired and made it the default face of Japanese comics. Toei's Sally the Witch, first broadcast in 1966, is usually counted as the first magical-girl series. The footless ghost in a white burial kimono is usually traced to the eighteenth-century painter Maruyama Ōkyo, and the oni with an iron club is proverbial: oni ni kanabō, a club for the demon, means making the strong stronger.
That shared idiom is why the folklore figures in this set look different from their irezumi versions. The yurei, the oni girl, the beckoning cat and the eastern dragon are drawn here as characters, with clean lines and no background at all; irezumi draws the same creatures the way Edo woodblock prints did, modelled in shade and set in wind and water across a large area. Neither is more authentic. They are two Japanese traditions that happen to share a cast.
The face sets the size
Eyes carry the whole expression in this style, and the lashes, iris ring and highlight inside them need room. A head-and-shoulders portrait holds from about 10 cm tall; a whole figure needs 15 cm or more, so that the face within it stays at that scale. Shrink either and the eyes close into dark ovals, and the character stops being anyone in particular.
Chibi is the exception, and the reason the style is so often tattooed small. A figure drawn two or three heads tall puts most of its area into the face, so a 6 cm chibi samurai has larger eyes than a realistically proportioned one twice its height. A tightly cropped pair of eyes works the same way. Both suit an ankle, a wrist or the back of the upper arm.
Colour is the maintenance question. The navy, red and black in these pieces hold like any saturated colour, but the pale lilac, sky blue and copper of anime hair soften first, especially on a forearm that sees sun, and they lose contrast long before the outline does. Keep a pale piece covered in summer or plan a refresh. Place the character on a photo at the size you have in mind before settling the palette.
What an hour of this work costs, and how many hours anime tattoos takes at each size, is in the cost guide. How it behaves later — under a laser, and as the thing doing the covering — is in the removal and cover-up guide.
Common questions
- Can I get a tattoo of a character from a series?
- Plenty of people do, and many artists will draw one. The character still belongs to the studio that created it, which is why nothing on this page is a named character, and why a good artist redraws rather than traces a screenshot. An invented character in the same idiom is the alternative this set offers.
- Why are anime eye highlights left as bare skin?
- Because skin is the brightest thing a tattoo has. White ink softens and can yellow as it ages, while a gap in the ink stays as light as the skin around it for good, so the glint keeps its sparkle only if it was never inked.
- How small can an anime tattoo be?
- A realistically proportioned face needs about 10 cm for its eyes to keep their lashes and highlights. Chibi figures and cropped eyes go down to around 5 or 6 cm, because nearly all of their area is face.
- Does colour anime fade faster than black and grey?
- The pastels do. Pale hair colours such as lilac and sky blue soften first, particularly on skin that sees sun, while saturated navy, red and black hold like any packed colour. The black outline carries the drawing either way, so a faded piece stays legible.
- Is anime the same as Japanese traditional tattooing?
- No, though they share a cast of oni, ghosts, dragons and lucky cats. Irezumi draws them as woodblock prints did, shaded and set in wind and water across a large area. Anime draws them as characters in flat colour with no background, which is why it works at sizes irezumi cannot.
See this style on your own skin
InkCraft places a design on a photo of you — scaled, wrapped and shaded to the spot you pick, so you can judge how the style reads on your body before it is permanent.