Butterfly tattoos: How big should they be?

Butterfly tattoos are a good choice for a first tattoo because the design doesn't need to be big to be striking. A small butterfly tattoo (life sized or smaller) on an ankle or shoulder can be a pretty and graceful accent to your natural beauty. These tattoos vary in sizes depending upon the body part you want to get it tattooed (usually, the butterfly-tattoos placed on the nape or behind the years are the smallest, those placed on the wrist/ankle/abdomen are medium-sized tattoos, while the lower back/upper back butterfly tattoos are usually larger, more stylised butterfly images).

Big butterfly design. Unless you want a lower-back tattoo, it's better to avoid a big butterfly tattoo. Butterflies are usually small, delicate, and beautiful creatures and trying to blow them up into mega insects doesn't always work. If you really want a huge butterfly tattoo you should consider a swarm of butterflies instead one giant butterfly.

Small butterfly design. Sometimes we can see some tiny butterfly tattoos that look more like mosquito-tattoos than beautiful butterflies. A butterfly tattoo should be large enough to highlight the brilliant design of the butterfly's wings; going to small is definitely a good way to ruin your tattoo.

Conclusion: lean towards a smaller sized butterfly as opposed to something big, but don't make it tiny! Play around with different small sizes and you should see the correct size "pop out" at you when the proportion is correct, and the detail is present.

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My recommendations: the polish artists Sebastian and Milena Żmijewski

If you are looking for inspiration for a biomechanical / 3D tattoo I recommend you to visit this website: www.bloodyart.pl (don't worry, is translated in English). The sites belongs to Sebastian and Milena Żmijewski, two Polish brothers who run together their own business: a tattoo studio called “Bloody Art” in Gdansk, Poland. If you decide to visit Gdansk (which, by the way, is one most beautiful cities of Poland) and you want to get a really stunning tattoo you can pay them a visit.

Sebastian Żmijewski is an amazing artist with more than 20 years of experience in tattoo art. A versatile artist and capable of almost everything, his pieces of work include any type of tattoos. Sebastian favourites are portraits and photo realistic challenges and he is a god when it comes to black & grey and covers-up.

Milena Żmijewski is also an artist, with painting, drawing and graphics experience as well as make-up and interior design knowledge. She had been learning tattooing techniques from her brother since 2011 and she is an important component of his projects. Milena does some of the most detailed paintings which Sebastian carefully depicts into skin afterwards.

Below you can see several examples of Sebastian and Milena’s stunning tattoos. I've selected only a few images from their huge collection. For more images, visit the original photo-gallery at this address: http://www.bloodyart.pl/#tattoo

A biomechanical corset tattoo

Forearm tattoo: mounted medieval knights

Biomechanical tattoo covering the lateral side of the body

Biomechanical tattoo: a gun loaded with monsters-bullets

Back-tattoo: a medieval ship

Biomechanical tattoo covering a man's chest, shoulder and upper arm

Biomechanical tattoo on the leg

3D tattoo on the calf

3D tattoos: dark-art biomechanical tattoos
Biomechanical tattoos: alien infestation
Cyborg Tattoos photos
Biomechanical tattoos

My tattoo-designs: the chinese Five Elements

Hello, everyone! In this post I'd like to present you one of my tattoo-designs which combines tribal elements with some ancient symbols used in the Taoist cosmology (namely, the Yin-Yang symbol and the Wu Xing ideograms).

Wu Xing tattoo. Ideograms meaning: the chinese Five Elements: Wood (木, mù), Fire (火, huǒ), Earth (土, tǔ), Metal (金, jīn), Water (水, shuǐ). For more Kanji/Hanzi-tattoo-designs visit my website, seiza.ro.

In Chinese philosophy, the concept of yin-yang is used to describe how opposite or contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world; and, how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. Many natural dualities (such as light and dark, high and low, hot and cold, fire and water, life and death, male and female, sun and moon, and so on) are thought of as physical manifestations of the yin-yang concept.

Yin and yang can be thought of as complementary (instead of opposing) forces interacting to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the parts. Everything has both yin and yang aspects, (for instance shadow cannot exist without light). Either of the two major aspects may manifest more strongly in a particular object, depending on the criterion of the observation.

The Wu Xing, (五行 wŭ xíng) also known as the Five Elements, Five Phases, the Five Agents, the Five Movements, Five Processes, and the Five Steps/Stages, is a fivefold conceptual scheme that many traditional Chinese fields used to explain a wide array of phenomena, from cosmic cycles to the interaction between internal organs, and from the succession of political regimes to the properties of medicinal drugs. The "Five Phases" are Wood (木 mù), Fire (火 huǒ), Earth (土 tǔ), Metal (金 jīn), and Water (水 shuǐ). This order of presentation is known as the "mutual generation" (xiangsheng 相生) sequence. In the order of "mutual conquest" (xiangsheng 相勝) or "mutual overcoming" (xiangke 相剋), they are Wood, Earth, Water, Fire, and Metal.

My tattoo-design turned into a real tattoo.

If you use any of my tattoo-designs as a model / inspiration / starting-point for a tattoo you might consider sending me some photos of the tattoo once it's complete. Thank you in advance.