Black & Grey Tattoos
Black ink and the greys you get by diluting it. Shading carries everything, which is why it suits portraits, animals, religious imagery and large-scale work.
47 pieces from the Legian studio
Black and grey is the broadest style we work in and the one most people arrive asking for without knowing its name. There is no colour in it at all. Every tone you see is black ink thinned down, laid in soft passes until the form appears, which means the whole piece lives or dies on shading rather than outline.
That makes it the natural home for faces, animals, statues and anything with real depth to it. A portrait needs hundreds of values between light and dark, and black and grey gives an artist every one of them. The same is true of fur, scales, stone and fabric, which is why so much of our large-scale work sits in this gallery.
It also ages better than almost anything else. There is no pigment to shift or fade unevenly, so a black and grey sleeve at fifteen years reads much the way it did at one. Looked after, it simply settles. If you are unsure which direction to take your first large piece, this is where most people land, and it is the easiest style to add to later.
Our black and grey artists work in realism, Japanese, religious and ornamental subjects, and you can see healed work from each of them before you book.