Size Matters: What You Need to Know About Micro Tattoos

If you performed a keyword search in our inbox, “small” or its derivatives would be a top hit. Many clients send in reference images, asking us to make the image as small as possible. More and more, how small a tattoo can be and how small a tattoo should be undergirds the artistic process.

First things first: let’s get some definitions on the table. A “small” tattoo is one to two inches; a micro tattoo is under an inch. Usually, small and micro tattoos are fine-line black linework without shading or color. You see these all over Instagram and Pinterest—tiny, dainty flowers, looping script, teensy stamps featuring woodland creatures. To be fair, these are super cute and accessible. You can easily cover a micro tattoo for an office job. However, micro tattoos are relatively new, so for awhile tattooists and clients didn’t know how they would age.

Aging Ink

At the most basic level, tattooists use needles to deposit ink into the dermis (middle) layer of the skin. The skin is our body’s largest organ, and as such, it is constantly changing as we age. The dermis layer thins with age and loses collagen and elasticity, changing the overall appearance of the skin. At the same time, the ink that was deposited in the dermal layer moves ever-so-slightly as the skin ages, blurring what started as sharp lines. UV exposure further impacts the ink, causing it to fade.

These factors are even more apparent on thin skin (wrists, hands, ankles, feet, neck) and skin that is regularly exposed to the sun, like forearms. Luckily, proper sun protection and skincare can slow your tattoo’s aging process.

Micro and Disappearing?

What we know about how ink ages in the skin comes from tattoos performed over the past thirty to forty years as they became more mainstream. Now that micro fine-line tattoos have been in the zeitgeist for awhile, we have been able to observe how they look five to ten years down the line. Our shop has noticed a few common issues with micro fine line tattoos as the years pass.

• Line expansion: As mentioned before, all tattoos spread with age. Tiny fine lines become a bit bigger, looking less crisp. Depending on the design, the blurriness can make the original design difficult to read or interpret.

• Line disappearance: Sometimes it can seem like the ink in a fine line tattoo has disappeared. It’s still present, but the natural fading that happens with aging is exacerbated.

With micro tattoos, you have a lot of thin linework in a small space, which can lead to an inch of blurry illegibility in 10-15 years. If you want to go fine line, our shop recommends going larger so you have the best chance of maintaining the tattoo’s integrity for years to come.