Its not always the base color. Sometimes it is the ink manufacturer. For the average light skinned person, average inks are fine. Mom’s Millenium makes a decent wide range of colors, but when you move to darker skin tones, browns, “reds” (which is more accurately an Umber) then these inks are really no longer sufficient. You want a better ink quality with brighter bolder colors. Your skin tone will tone the bright colors down, but the bright colors will still show through.
Some colors don’t heal true. Meaning that in the ink cup they may look deep red, but when they heal, they heal a dull, faded, almost pink.
Years ago on the west coast a “black” tattoo artist experimented with a unique style of reverse shading. Kind of using the same concept you would use on a scratch board. He used white ink to define the shape and areas we would normally leave blank on a caucasion, and left the natural skin color for dark shade. It was a fantastic excercise and looked great.
Here’s the problem. On most people white disperses over time, so my question was “How will the tattoo look in a year” I never heard anything else about it, so I never was able to have my question answered.
The quality of ink you would need…in my opinion…would mean that you would pay more than average for your tattoo work, but its worth the investment.
Just my opinion.The majority of my work has been on caucasions or olive skinned people. What work I’ve done on darker skin has almost exclusively been in black.
