It can’t be overstated: White ink is crap. It will usually turn piss-yellow or beige or some odd and unpleasant color like that.

Aye, and in some ways it’s absolutely necessary to make some tattoos come alive. I just wish it didn’t have to turn to shit so soon.
For example I have a few eyes planned, and I’ve oft thought about some kind of alternative color to use, especially in highlights. Perhaps something like really light blues and reds, or kinds of silver colors could look good, but I guess they’re created with white anyway so not much help there either.

@Sam-I-Am 129163 wrote:

Ever notice that drinking beer (yellow) makes you piss clear, while drinking water (clear) makes you piss yellow?

Since I find the taste of beer repulsive I can’t say that I have, no 🙂

@GrayCatLove 129169 wrote:

If you keep the tattoo out of the sun and just use white as a little accent, it doesn’t hold up too bad. My first tattoo had white in it, and while it’s not as bright as it once was, it’s okay.

If you have almost no melanin in your skin (eg. you have very very white skin that can NEVER get a tan at all no matter how long you spend laying in the sun), and you keep it out of the sun then there is a chance it will stay white.

There is a considerable amount of white on the face of my peacock and it still looks fantastic. But I have very very pale white skin, don’t have enough melanin to ever get a tan, and have never ever exposed it to any sun. And never will.

But, if you can get a tan (I hate you all), then your white ink will not stay white.

@Swansoda 129181 wrote:

So then why do people get white ink? Are that many people unaware of how it changes? Why do the artists use it?

My artist uses it just to enhance a tattoo. It’s pretty much expected that it will be getting retouched in the future.

@Swansoda 129181 wrote:

So then why do people get white ink? Are that many people unaware of how it changes? Why do the artists use it?

A friend of mine, who is of Ukrainian heritage and tans like a fiend, got a tattoo recently and the artist used a ton of white on it. She was going to go back to have even more white added to it until I told her what will happen to her ‘white’ rose.

She had let an apprentice do the work, but whoever was supervising the apprentice should have stopped them. I told her to go back to the shop and explain to the apprentice about putting white ink under olive coloured skin so that they don’t do it to anyone else. But since my friend really doesn’t believe me she hasn’t. I bet her ‘white’ rose looks like doo-doo by the end of the year.

Some artists don’t know. Some don’t care, they already have your cash by the time it turns to doo-doo.

A couple of weeks before we coloured in the face of my peacock a friend of Italian heritage went to my local shop for an Italian flag tattoo. She had it done by the apprentice there. My artist was very clear to the apprentice that if you put white ink under brown/olive skin it won’t be white, so they left the ‘white’ part of the flag uncoloured. Several weeks later when we were working on the face of my peacock my artist looked at some pics of peacocks and said she was going to use white. I laughed and said ‘you mean skin colour’. She said nope. We went back and forth a bit, joking, and then she poured some white into a cup and went for it.

The difference is the skin colour. Those of us with milky white skin can do white. The rest of you are out of luck. Period.