190 Unique New School Tattoos, Designs, & Ideas

Oct 9, 2023

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You will know a new school tattoo when you see one. New school tattoos call for big, bright, bold, solid colors with heavy black outlines to push things forward. New school tattoo designs have this very cartoonish, well-colored, rendered design that is every graphic artist’s dream.

What is New School Tattoo Style?

New School tattoo style is one of the newest to hit the tattoo scene and keeps growing. It is a tattoo style that originated as early as the 1970s and has evolved a lot since then. New school tattoos are influenced by street art, cartoons, comics, and realism. You will see uses of bold outlines, popped colors, and exaggerated perspectives in new school tattoo style.

The Origin of New School Tattooing

New school tattoos look nothing like traditional tattoos, but it follows some basic techniques of traditional style. Like neo-traditional and traditional tattoos, new school tattoos use bold black lines to keep the colors separated, and they also use large shapes and designs that create legible tattoos. In the 90s, tattoo artists experimented with tattoo designs that incorporated celebrities, science fiction, anime, and manga characters. Various pop cultures influenced new school tattooing a lot, and it became one of the biggest tattoo trends. Since then, the style has evolved so much as people accept and experiment with more and more new designs and ideas these days. New school is all about self-expression and the celebration of art. Tattoo artists are also continuously pushing their boundaries with new school tattoo designs because it gives them the ultimate freedom to choose subjects, techniques, and colors.

The Style of New School Tattoos

When it comes to new school tattoo designs, childhood nostalgia and fantasies play a big part. That is why comic book heroes, anime, or sci-fi fantasy characters are perhaps the most common concepts within this style. Any particular tattoo style does not restrict new school tattoos, so you get whatever you want and the way you want. This style of tattoo is trendy among gamers, comic and graphic novel lovers, and anime lovers.

Besides animations, graffiti has a lot of influence on New school tattoo style. Graffiti was always popular in the underground, but it became mainstream in the 90s. Like graffiti, the tattoos are vibrant and colorful. New School tattoo artists used bright colors, drop shadows, and graceful lines of street artists as inspiration for their designs. You will notice that graffiti fonts are ubiquitous in new school tattoo designs.

New School Tattoos vs Old School Tattoos

New school tattoos do not follow all the traditional guidelines of tattooing. People often confuse them with neo-Traditional tattoos as they also use bright colors and 3D shadings. neo-Traditional tattoos are a modern representation of old-school traditional tattoos. Even they are grown from the same roots but still not different.

The difference between New school and Old school tattoos are:

In subject matter, there are no restrictions in new school tattooing where old school tattoos only use limited subjects like anchors, swallows, knives, etc.
New school tattooing is freestyle and does not follow any defined style, but old school tattooing has its own style and strict rules.
It’s all about color for new school, but old school tattoos use a limited color palette.
Most new school tattoos use 3D shadings, where old school tattoos have 2D.

The popularity of new School tattooing has grown considerably in recent years with the appearance of talented artists. They continuously surprise us with their creativity and unique designs. The below collection of the New School Tattoos presents an enormous artistic diversity, spanning genres related to this relatively new style of tattooing, such as Graffiti, Comics, Cartoons, Anime, and Pop Culture. Depending on the artists, you will see the diverse techniques they have used to create these tattoos and their distinctive personal touch on each of them.

Tattoo Placement

Due to the vibrant and in-your-face style of a new school tattoo, the design demands a lot of space for your tattoo artist to work. Usually, the upper arm and the forearm is the most common place to get a new school tattoo.

For a large piece, you can put it on your back or chest.

Smaller tattoos look great on your wrist, ankle, and forearm.

Your tattoo artist can also help you to choose a design that fits you.