Many times we talk about tattoos that require dedication to wear, most often when discussing hand or neck tattoos. Head tattoos can be thrown into that category as well—hiding them is pretty damn difficult—but they deserve a little extra credit given the placement. If you’ve ever gotten a head tattoo, or even just watched somebody else get one, you know that it’s one of the most painful sites to get inked. From a purely sadistic point of view I love watching the different grimaces people make as they get their noggin worked on.
Moving beyond the concept of dedication, head tattoos are incredibly bad ass. There is so much an artist can do with that real estate. It’s pretty much the only part of the body that is rounded, thus making it the perfect location for all sorts of different designs, like an orb ripe for the pondering, for example.
As we were researching (the fancy word we use for “looking at Instagram”) this article, there were two very notable things we discovered. 1. The head is a location that seems fit for every style of tattoo, and 2. Head tattoos seems to have religious overtones far more often than other spots on the body.
The first part seems like a no brainer, essentially every part of the human body should be fit for any style of tattoo, but when you spend all of your waking hours around this stuff you’ll quickly learn that tends to not be the case. Knuckle tattoos are almost always traditional. Full bodysuits are almost always Japanese. The stomach is the preferred destination for intricate script. So it was really cool to see that the head is welcoming of every tattoo style—from traditional to black-and-grey to Japanese to color realism and beyond.
It’s the second thing that sort of surprised us. Religious themes are quite common in tattooing, but it seems like an inordinate amount of head tattoos feature religious iconography. Admittedly, we didn’t do a scientific test of this theory, we just looked at a bunch of head tattoos and saw a lot of portraits of Jesus, sacred hearts, etc. It makes sense when you consider the visibility of a head tattoo. Considering the tattoo will always be on display, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that a person would choose tattoos they hold sacred for such placement.
Anyway, this is all just a lot of vamping before we get to the reason you’re really here: a photo gallery filled with pictures of awesome head tattoos. Check ’em out!
Source: www.inkedmag.com