Portland-based tattoo artist Winston the Whale creates simple yet impressive 3D tattoos that make viewers feel like they are experiencing blurry vision.

Winston the Whale started making his signature 3D tattoos after a friend asked him if he could make a three-dimensional design for him. It ended up better than he’d hoped, so he kept making them. To be clear, the artist’s artworks aren’t really 3D, they just have that nostalgic red-and-blue color scheme and overlapping pattern that tricks the viewers’ eyes into thinking they are seeing double. Even though trippy, colorful tattoos are now his bread and butter, 3D tattoos still have a special place in Winston’s heart.

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Inspired by geometry, nature and illustrations from vintage science books, Italian artist Michele Volpi creates some of the most unique tattoos you’ll ever see.

Known for his monochromatic fine-blackwork style, Michele Volpi combines his love for the color black with pointilism and with his passion for various sciences to create tattoos that simply stand out. Relying on his background of technical drawing, Volpi expertly renders anything from biological specimens to anatomical diagrams and mysterious physics formulas. Those don’t sound like great idea for tattoos, but the talented Italian artist somehow makes them work.

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A South Korean porcelain painter specializing in watercolor-like designs, managed to adapt her art to a whole new, more sensitive canvas, the human skin.

Bucheon-based tattoo artist Abii had spent about six years working as a professional porcelain painter when her mentor encouraged her to start practicing tattooing as well. She had always wanted to expand the way she expressed herself artistically, so this was a welcome challenge. She started studying under a famous South Korean tattoo artist, and before long, Abii was inking the same beautiful motifs from her porcelain masterpieces on human skin.

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Brazilian tattoo artist Clayton Dias has been getting attention for his signature holographic sticker tattoos that not only have the characteristic metallic shimmer of the real thing but also appear to be applied on the skin.

Sticker tattoos have become really popular lately, and the rising popularity of artists like Lucke Cormier is a clear example of that, but the tattoo style is continually evolving. Case in point, the work of Clayton Dias, a talented tattoo artist from Porto Alegre, Brazil, who has developed his own technique of giving sticker tattoos the holographic treatment, which gives them a characteristic metallic shimmer.

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Funky Matas, a social media entertainer based in Florida, holds the world record for most signatures tattooed on the back, including those of celebrities like Will Smith or Gerard Butler.

Funky, real name Juan Matas, used to work as a tattoo artist himself and came up with the project that would end up defining his career as an online entertainer while thinking of a unique project with his body as the canvas. In the end, he narrowed the quest down to two options – turning his back into a MySpace-like form for his family and friends to fill out, or having his friends sign his back with a tattoo machine. The latter was more down his alley, considering his profession, only it didn’t stop with his friends. His family signed his back as well, then famous tattoo artists, and before he knew it, Funky Matas was chasing celebrities and asking them to sign his back so he could then permanently ink it onto his body. His back now has over 225 tattooed signatures, a world record.

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Los Angeles-based tattoo artist Jesse Garcia has built a reputation on his ability to ink realistic-looking black widow spiders on virtually any body part.

Working out of his own private tattoo studio in Los Angeles, Garcia has been getting a lot of attention for his eerily realistic black widows, which look ready to jump off of his clients’ skin. While he is more than capable of tackling other designs, looking at the artist’s Instagram portfolio, it’s easy to see that the black widow is his signature element. Whether seemingly crawling out of someone’s ear, or on their legs and arms, it looks just as disturbing to an arachnophobe like myself.

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Canadian tattoo artist Luke Cormier has a very distinct art style – he creates colorful tattoos that look like stickers you can peel off of your skin.

Featuring all sorts of popular cartoon and video game characters, from Super Mario to the Powerpuff Girls or Rick and Morty, Luke Cormier’s tattoos are some of the most adorable we’ve ever seen. But what really makes his designs stand out is the sticker treatment. Complete with a white line, clever shading and realistic-looking creases, they look like actual stickers ready to peel off, even though they are inked with a tattoo gun.

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At only 19 years of age, Maxim Sipakov is already a very skilled animator with his own unique niche – he uses neon effects to enhance the appearance of tattoos.

Maxim honed his skills by animating online soccer videos, but he soon found that his talent was much better suited for digital tattoo enhancing, so he decided to focus on that. He takes videos from tattoo artists and other creators and works his magic on them, taking the already impressive body art to a whole new level. Maxim showcases his digital animation skills on Instagram and TikTok, where he has hundreds of thousands of fans and millions of views.

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A young tattoo artist who goes by the name ‘Ngoc’ on social media has become famous for helping people, especially women hide their scars by inking beautiful artworks over them

For many people having to live with visible scars, either from accidental burns, operations like appendectomy or cesarean section is an everyday struggle. But thanks to talented tattoo artist Ngoc, some of them don’t have to. The Hanoi-based artist is known as a magician in the Vietnamese tattooing community, as scars are considered very difficult to deal with, but she always seems to find the best design to perfectly conceal them.

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Invented in the 1970s, ASCII art is still popular in online chats, on forums and websites, but one insanely talented tattoo artist is able to ink stunning portraits using only the 95 characters characters from the 1963 American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) standard on his clients’ skin.

31-year-old Andreas Vrontis has always been fascinated by ASCII art and “how a simple lettering pattern could create so much symmetry and detail in the end result”, so a few years ago, he started experimenting with ways to integrate the digital art style into his real-life tattoos. Vrontis has been tattooing for six years, but he made his first ASCII tattoo in 2015, a portrait of John Lennon. He was nervous about how it would turn out, but it ended up winning him the “Best in Show” prize at at the Cyprus International Tattoo Convention. He has been improving his technique ever since, and his latest works of art simply breathtaking.

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At just 30-years-old, Karol Rybakowski is already one of the biggest names in the world of tattoos, and looking at some of his works, it’s pretty easy to see why. His portrait tattoos look as if a picture has been slapped on the subject skin, and in many cases they turn out even better than the photos that inspired them.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Karol Rybakowski studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Warsaw, before becoming a tattoo artist, but while that explains his artistic style, I for one still can’t wrap my head around how a 30-year-old can create such stunningly-realistic tattoos. And apparently, I’m not the only one. About four years ago, just when his works started showing up online, people in the business who had never seen his tattoos in person actually thought that they were photoshopped. There was a particularly heated debate surrounding his tattoo of Bradley Cooper as sniper Chris Kyle in “American Sniper” with many people claiming that it looked too good to be true.

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Inal Bersekov is an incredibly talented tattoo artist from Belgium whose black and white, photo-realistic tattoos look printed on the skin of his clients.

There are plenty of celebrated tattoo artists in the world today, each with their own unique styles, but when it comes to inking detailed portraits, you probably won’t find anyone better than Inal Bersekov. The quality of his works is so insane that it’s nearly impossible to tell that you’re looking at someone’s tattoo, and not a black and white photo, or a really good hyper-realistic drawing.

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A Los Angeles artist is on a mission to cover her entire body with tattoos. She’s offering herself up as a human billboard by tattooing people’s names and designs all over her body, for as low as $10.

Illma Gore, 22, said that the initiative is a part of her ‘absurd and beautiful’ project called A Hundred Tiny Stories. She was actually trying to raise $6,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, in order to cover the cost of 60 hours worth of tattooing. She actually managed to raise a whopping $11,000, until the campaign got suspended.

“It’s art,” she explained. “It will annoy people or make them happy or make them smile. Either way, that’s what art’s supposed to do.”

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While most modified motorbikes are adorned with tattoo motifs using an airbrush, The Recidivist is unique because its wheels, tank, seat and rear fender are completely covered in tattooed skin. This was achieved by engineering the bike with light colored leather similar to the color of human skin. Polish tattoo artists Tomasz Lech and Krzysztof Krolak then spent a whopping 250 hours inking the bike, using the tools of world-famous supplier Cheyenne Professional Tattoo Equipment. The project was commissioned by Game Over Cycles.

“This is by far the most complicated bike we’ve constructed so far,” the Polish company posted on their Facebook page. “To tattoo the bike is one thing, but to include the construction elements that draw from the look of tattoo machines and make them fully operational units was some challenge.” They also added that the theme of the Cheyenne Bike relates to the traditional relationship between motorbikes and tattoos.

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If you’ve ever wanted to sport one of those sloppy jail tattoos, but didn’t really want to go through the whole jail experience, we’ve got just the guy for you – he goes by “Synyster Ink” and he’s probably the world’s worst tattoo artist.

I’m still not sure if this guy is a genius or someone who’s hands should be tied behind his back so he doesn’t scar anymore gullible people. There are people who actually consider his work to be genuine art, but not too many. The majority of those who’ve seen Synyster Ink’s tattoos on Facebook thinks they’re absolute crap, and recommend he find a job at McDonald’s or Walmart, instead of tattooing. He’s a pretty resilient guy, though, as thousands of negative comments haven’t stopped him from “following his”dream and creating “original” permanent tattoos. There’s not a lot to say about a tattoo artist who apparently can’t even draw a straight line, except that he’s based in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and that he found plenty of people naive enough to let him work his magic on their bodies. How this guy didn’t get hit with a lawsuit is beyond me.

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