Getting Started With a Cover Up Tattoo

People wouldn’t request a cover-up tattoo if there weren’t something already embedded in their skin. So, to look closer at the markings made during a tattoo, we need to focus on where Ink Fanatic Tattoos tattoos are implanted – the skin. To start, let’s think about how thick skin is.

The depth of the existing tattoo plays heavily into the condition of the skin where the cover-up tattoo will be placed. Tattoos that go extremely deep will have a greater chance of healing with scarring, which we discussed briefly in the previous article. Scarring is challenging to maneuver. Not only does it change the topography of the skin, making some spots sit higher than others, but it also changes the skin’s physical construction.

Scarring and Skin Construction
Scarring is a real problem with modern tattoo applications. It is also something that is easily avoided. Awareness of skin construction, repair, and how a tattoo affects the skin is necessary for a positive outcome. Tattoos, when done correctly, are superficial wounds, even if there is a foreign substance being implanted in the body.

Topical wounds (like that in a tattoo) don’t open the body’s internals to the environment. The damage is relegated to the skin, the body’s protective covering. By keeping needle depth accurate and by keeping the trauma necessary to achieve the tattoo to a minimum, heal times decrease, and the chances of scarring are kept to a minimum. This is important to remember as some coverups require multiple sessions to complete, with each session increasing the chances of the skin acquiring the formation of scar tissues.

The Problems with Learning to Do Cover-Up Tattoos
While I know that many clients have gotten a tattoo that they may regret later in life, the majority of cover-up tattoos that I see are done by at-home tattooers or those with little to no cover-up experience. This becomes a problem when a competent artist attempts to do a cover-up without guidance, education, or help from someone well-experienced. It is an industry bottleneck where a select few have obtained the knowledge necessary to complete the procedure correctly and have not disseminated their findings to the industry at large.