Even the best of people can land up in a situation where they end up with an awful looking tattoo. It is true! You don’t have to be a bad person or necessarily have bad karma to be saddled with a poorly done tattoo. It can and does happen more often than you would think. Your choices in such cases are limited, you can:
- Learn to live with it and let it be a lesson to others so that they do not make the same mistake
- You can get it removed using a laser process. A warning here; this process can be really painful
- You can disguise it or have it covered
The first two options are pretty much cut and dried, but if you are considering the third option then here are few points for you to ponder and a few hints to make it work:
Get an artist who can work around this. Covering up a bad tattoo is not something that every run of the mill artist can do. It needs special skills and a lot of imagination and creativity. You can do some research and talk to a few people. You should even take the precaution of visiting the artist and viewing a few samples of similar work done by them. This is important as you do not want to end up with a clumsy cover up job that will make things worse.
Make a choice of whether to cover up or incorporate the design. How fond of your existing tattoo are you? Does the tattoo need to be slightly worked upon or does it need to be made into something else entirely? Converting it into something else by incorporating in a new design is much better than complete cover up.
Keep the elements and combinations in your proposed design open to changes. It is good that you are looking to give a new look to your existing tattoo but do not be too rigid about the new design. The thing is as the artist works he will have to tweak the original design that you have decided upon, depending on how the tattoo coverup turns up. This will need some leeway. An important hint here is that it is best to work with darker hues as they are better at coverup than lighter hues. The logic is darker color can camouflage lighter ones but not the other way around.
It may not turn out to be an ideal or even a superb design. You have to remember that you are making the best of a bad situation and the results may not be amazing. Sometimes things do fall into place and the new design manages to obliterate the traces of the old one but sometimes this may not be the case. The final results of your tattoo cover up will also depend on the design and colors of the older tattoo.
Ensure that this does not happen again. Once you have gone to all the trouble and effort to cover up a major mistake, the one lesson that you should take away from this is never to let this happen again. The next time you get a tattoo consider all the factors. Imagine how the tattoo will look as your skin ages, try and visualize whether the tattoo will really look good on the location you have picked, do a lot of research on the artist who is doing the tattooing this time and then only go ahead with the tattoo. So please consider the pros and cons of any tattoo well before you actually get inked again.
