Vertical tribal (for an arm?)

And another tribal tattoo design... damn, I promise I'll try something a bit more interesting next.
vertical tribal


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I guess the round shape at the top make this one suitable for an upper arm. At least, I often saw tribal with circular shapes on the top that fits rather well on arms.


The grey inlay is there to prevent it to look too heavy.

Ornamental tribal whatever tattoos

Yes, I lacked inspiration for the title :p. Two simple ornamental tribal-ish tattoo designs.

Ornamental swirly tattoo design

Kind of abstract, I guess ornamental is the right name.

ornamental swirls design




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This was actually based on a triskel shape, though it's hardly visible now, there's only 3 circular shapes left.
There's also a dragon with butterfly wings, yes, I swear. Look at the tiny round "o" on the left, it is right in the dragon's mouth, and if you follow the dragon "body" you'll find that the bits of strings in () shape are the wings. (I'm not sure that my explanations are good but explaining things in text is difficult, argh.)

So yay, a tattoo design with hidden meanings. :p

Symmetrical gothic tattoo design

A kind of gothic / tribal tattoo design. I like the carving effect, as in old churches.
Gothic symmetrical tattoo design



This one took forever and a day, just because I'm effing slow at shading. It's not that it's so difficult to shade, it's that's it's very difficult not to smudge what has already been shaded. (Anyone got some tips to avoid the smudging? So far I use post-it notes to mask some parts of the drawing.)

Black ink + pencils (mostly HB, and a bit of 2B and 5B).
The shadow around the design was done on computer, because I was to afraid to mess everything and smuuuudge the whole stuff. 

Tribalish tentacles

So yeah, lone tentacles again, without a full octopus body. I tried to mimic the simplicity and flowing shape that is found in some tribal designs.
tentacles tattoo design


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I like the organic shape of these things - here I see a kind of treble clef shape on the front tentacle... Well, with a lot of imagination maybe :p. 
I added a somewhat pale-skin-color background, in order to see what it could look like as a tattoo with a few white highlights. Not sure this is very visible actually.

Also, I keep drawing the suction cups like this .˙.˙.˙.˙.˙.˙.˙. instead of :::::: (as seen on a lot of drawings) because as far as I can tell from photos, the two rows of suckers have a small offset. But I'm not sure to be right (most of the time, they just seems to be in a total mess)