Testing Your Tattoo Designs with Temporary Tattoo Paper
Tattoos are a lifetime decision, which is why it's important to ensure that you're choosing the right tattoo for you. Generally I recommend first visiting a site like Chopper Tattoo which has about 10,000 tattoos available to try out your idea and view others before you get inked. The cost is minimal and you may find the perfect idea or design for your next tattoo.
A new tattoo is one of the biggest commitments you can make. Even if you’ve been inked before, every new tattoo needs to be a part of an important decision making process, since once you get the tattoo, it may never be removed.
The problem is that it’s difficult to know with certainty that you’ll like the tattoo on your body. It’s not enough to know you like the design – especially if you design your own tattoo – you need to know that the tattoo looks exactly as you want it to look once it’s on your skin. Even the greatest tattoo design can look poor if it’s in the wrong place or not meant for your body shape. That’s why ideally you need a way to test your tattoo before you decide to go get permanently inked. You need a way to be certain that it looks great on you even before it’s been placed on your body.
Testing Your Tattoo
Whether you’re designing the tattoo yourself, using a tattoo artist, or printing tattoos from the Internet, it’s important that you get an idea how the tattoo will look on you.
In the past, we’ve recommended henna. Henna lasts about 3 weeks, it can be inked at least close to the original design, and you can get used to the tattoo for a while and see how you feel. Henna is especially useful for those that are getting their first tattoo and may not be certain they’re ready to get one.
But henna has some downsides as a method of deciding whether or not you want to get a specific tattoo – namely, it’s brown, and it’s hard to use. You can’t henna on yourself very accurately unless you’re getting a foot tattoo, and the finer details will be lost in anything that isn’t a tribal tattoo. That means that while henna is useful, it’s imperfect. If you are purchasing a tattoo online, henna is essentially useless.
So what should you use?
For some reason, this was something I didn’t realize existed – although in retrospect I should have known this existed. Recently I found that you can pick up temporary tattoo paper. This paper allows you to print out a temporary tattoo on a standard inkjet printer and then put the tattoo on your body.
Temporary tattoo paper is an excellent idea, and one that I wish I had mentioned to people before. It allows you to genuinely give yourself any tattoo for a few days and see how much you like it, seeing almost a perfect replica of the tattoo on your body to ensure it’s what you want.
Temporary tattoo paper is a great choice if you design your own tattoo or if you are using a tattoo from an online tattoo gallery. It’s less ideal if you’re trusting in the work of a tattoo artist since they’re unlikely to give you the tattoo for free, but as far as I’m aware there is no tattoo artist that will let you see what the tattoo looks like before they put it on your body, since that’s where they get their money.
Although I think you could probably bring a few temporary tattoo paper packages to an artist and there’s a chance they’ll be willing to print out their tattoo design on the paper, although most artists will probably decline.
Print Your Tattoo on Temporary Tattoo Paper
There aren’t many tattoo tests kits available to ensure that you’ll like the tattoo you put on your skin. But with temporary tattoo paper, you can test out any tattoo yourself. It’s a great idea – especially for those getting their first tattoo – and one that you may want to strongly consider even if you already have several tattoos already.
