Leaderboard

It'll largely depend on the abilities of the particular artist. I'd think that most would want to start at least half again as big as what I'm seeing here.

That you, I will show you all updated pictures when I get it fixed. I have my appointment for December 9th. Hope all goes well. You all have been awesome !

Great advice here so far. The inverse of what @Hogrider is the bigger you go, the more detail you will get.

The smaller you go, the more you lose detail and the more it will all run together visually.

thanks all for the response. those tattoos look awesome. yes i have checked his work before and i have even had him do a venom tattoo on my from spider-man. that is why i went back to him. now as for the picture let me rephrase what i said. he had the picture and had it as a reference picture i never gave him the picture to go by. but it is a good picture to use. i'm not sure why he made it look so washed out and cartoon like if he had a portrait picture to go.honestly i dont care what kind of style the tattoo is as long as it looked good but it does not. it looks very bland and washed out. i have booked another artist at a different shop to get this mess sorted out ,they do cover up/reworks and portrait style so i hope they can fix it and i have looked at the work of this artist as well.thanks all for the help. here is a picture of my venom tattoo the artist did as well. deff way better than the one he did here. maybe he had an off day.who knows.

go big or go home.

That's a suave tattoo design. I can't tell you how small you could go because I don't know you and I'm a very bad visualizer. BUT, your (good) artist will definitely let you know that some of your elements need to be big enough so that they don't blob together after some years or are hard to see. Like the moon, or the details in the pearls above the ribbon. So keep in mind it will have to be big enough to make sure those can be seen/or tattooed clearly.

I live in liberty s.c. I though the dark around the face was a bit dark but I didn't know the whole tattoo looked bad for it not being a portrait style tattoo.I thought it looked like a normal style tattoo. Thanks for being honest and helping me guys

What went wrong was the the tattooer was in WAY over his head on this tattoo and tried to do it anyway. It doesn't look unfixable, it's just going to take some time, money and maybe the aid of a laser. Where do you live, maybe someone on here could give you a recommendation?

I recently bought "New York City Tattoo: The Oral History of an Urban Art" by Michael McCabe. There are incredible interviews with people like Crazy Eddie, Stanley Moskowitz and Huck Spaulding long with really cool photos. It is fantastic that their stories were captured for posterity. Cool read!