Why do some tattoos (especially text) look ‘blurry’ and smudged while others looks super clean?
In: 5
Tattoos age over time. Bright and sharp lined tattoos are usually fresh, and blurry and faded ones are usually years old. Basically the ink in your skin is mostly held in place by glomming on of immune cells, but that area is still alive and ink gets shifted as old cells die and new cells are created. Some regions like the hands with thinner skin lots of cell division are particularly prone to this kind of fading.
Better technique and certain styles can mitigate the effect of aging, but can’t eliminate it.
There’s also a separate thing where the artist is just not so good, or maybe just working on a particularly difficult area of skin, and doesn’t hold sharp lines or goes too deep and ink gets put into the much less stable layers of skin and blows out.
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