Bold will hold

American Traditional

Bold line, solid black, limited color. The stuff that still looks like a tattoo in thirty years — and the best place to start if it is your first.

Traditional is built on a simple rule: heavy outline, solid fill, high contrast. That is not a stylistic quirk, it is engineering. Skin moves, ink spreads and the sun does its work, and a bold traditional tattoo is designed to survive all three. Thirty years on it still reads as what it is.

The subjects come from a century of shop walls — eagles, panthers, roses, daggers, hearts, pin-ups, swallows. There is a reason they keep getting tattooed. Between the four of us there is a lot of it on the wall, and most of it can be done same-day.