Tattoo Flash & Other Design Resources

By The Editors of TattooFinder.com

If everyone could design their own tattoos, there would be no need for tattoo flash or other types of design reference. But, not all of us are great artists or understand how to create tattoo-friendly designs. Tattooing is an art form with distinct limitations and, despite the artistic ability of your tattooist, not all of your ideas can be translated (easily or at all) to a tattoo design that will look good and last over time. The reality is that most tattoos require high-quality, tattoo-friendly design reference to apply your tattoo and to make sure you get exactly what you expected. So what are your options?

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Tattoo Flash

The word “flash” likely originated from the blinking lights of carnivals during the early days of modern tattooing. At that time, the craft was still a novelty and it was the tattooist’s responsibility to provide design reference for customers to choose from. Once these tattooists set up studios of their own, the artwork reference went up on the walls and people would choose a tattoo studio based on the designs they had to pick from.

Eventually, the best flash artists stepped forward and distribution companies, like Cherry Creek Flash and Crystal Productions (Edward Lee Flash), sold artwork from multiple artists directly to studios. They eventually found modern sales avenues to reach their clients and moved individual design sales to the Internet. You’ll still find tattoo artwork on the walls and in the tattooist portfolios of studios today. But remember that finding the perfect design there might lock you into getting your tattoo at that particular studio.

Books & Magazines

You’ll find a lot of reference images in the glossy pages of books and magazines, but beware of their limitations. Photographs, highly detailed drawings, small images and many others won’t easily translate to a tattoo and may end up disappointing you when you take it to have tattooed. Unless your book or magazine is full of tattoo-friendly artwork, refer to it for inspiration only.

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Searching the Internet

It’s hard to do anything without the Internet these days, so it’s natural to want to use it in your design search. Internet search engines can actually be a great resource, particularly if you’re looking for commercial logos or images from bands, sports teams, car manufacturers or famous cartoon designs (copyrighted graphics that are all rarely found in traditional flash artwork). But the Internet is vast territory and searching through it for your perfect tattoo design can be tedious and time consuming. Your search will also probably result in a lot of images that are poor quality and will need some reworking to make them tattoo-friendly. Although that Google image search may give you a wealth of ideas, it’s not likely to give you your perfect tattoo design.

“Free” versus “Quality”: What to stay away from

More sources of design reference are all of the various tattoo-related websites that post “free flash.” At first glance “free” looks pretty good, right? Well, free artwork might be useful, especially if you are looking for tattoo ideas. But think twice; websites that post free tattoo flash usually limit their collection to “donated” artwork from artists that might not be particularly reputable. Generally these types of sites make it possible for anyone with paper and pencils to submit designs and call themselves a flash artist. Other online flash collections might be described as “smash and grab deal” sites, charging you a subscription fee to view all of the designs in their collection. A lot of these images are also donated to the site, not to mention pilfered and resold without paying royalties to the artists who created them.

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The point is that you get what you pay for and the quality of the designs in free and subscription-based flash galleries is generally pretty poor and rarely includes stencils. The sites are also never easily searchable which makes finding specific types of designs difficult and time-consuming. Keep in mind that the best tattoo flash artists make their living drawing tattoo artwork. How could they afford to make their entire collection available for one low subscription fee or donate tattoos of their best artistic creations to a site for free? The best tattoo flash artists don’t do this, so you’ll likely be left browsing through low-quality artwork.

Single Design Sales: TattooFinder.com

Your best resource to consider is probably the “single design sale” websites like TattooFinder.com, which have the specific purpose of making it quick and simple to search through thousands of the best tattoo designs available in the world. Browsing TattooFinder.com is free and, once you find your perfect tattoo design (or tattoo-friendly design references), you can purchase the artwork with accompanying stencils — both of which are available immediately to print and take to the tattooist of your choice. The artwork on these types of websites is typically very high quality and TattooFinder.com has agreements with our artists to pay them royalties for each sale of their work. So not only are you going to get great artwork, you’ll be supporting industry artists, too.

Aside from making thousands of tattoo-friendly designs available for easy browsing, TattooFinder.com also provides additional services to help you choose the perfect tattoo design. You can add images to a personal gallery for later consideration and email design links to family and friends to get their opinions. The site also has post-purchase image manipulation tools so you can rotate, flip and scale your design to see what types of personalization might be possible. Your purchase never expires and you can print your tattoo-friendly designs at any time, so the options are endless. And we know that getting a tattoo may mean being part of a new community, so TattooFinder.com helps you stay connected with a wealth of industry information, celebrity and artist interviews, exclusive events and tattoo studio spotlights.