The best way to get comfortable with the feel of working on skin - and the best way to avoid leaving behind a bad tattoo - is to start with easy tattoos for beginner artists.
This library of easy tattoos is a great place to return to when you need designs that are simple to create and look amazing.
Simple designs can help you get customers. These designs are perfect for people new to tattoos who want to start small and simple. Having these designs on hand can help you land a few first clients and build a few solid portfolio pieces when you go to get a job in a tattoo shop.
Click on a category to jump, or scroll through this list of 100 easy tattoo designs for beginners:
Skull | Tribal | Cute | Animal | Space | Nature | Music | Traditional | Character | Funny | Sentimental
Easy Skull Tattoo Designs for Beginners
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Most tattoo artists will tell you that the perfect tattoo for your very first tattoo will be a small, easy-to-hide design. This simple tattoo can be kept tiny and lets you avoid the trickiest parts of tattooing skulls: the shading and the teeth.
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The simple tattoo design lets you play with angles...without dealing with the 3-D aspect. Use simple lines to create a grin and add personality with easy, single-line “eyebrows.”
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Most artists learn American traditional designs first because they use bold lines and a limited color palette. This skull lets you practice clean linework and shading without asking you to blend lots of different colors.
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Easy Tribal Tattoos for Beginners
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Small tribal tattoo designs
Tribal is all about thick, dark lines that flow with the body. While simple and fairly easy to apply, this type of design allows you to create a stellar-looking piece without incorporating lots of detail. Simply align the design with the flow of the body to accentuate the curve of a muscle.
Cute Tattoo Ideas for Beginners
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Easy Animal Tattoo Ideas
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Easy Space Tattoos
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Simple Nature Tattoos for Beginners
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This sun lets you use negative space so that you don’t have to draw a circle with your tattoo machine. You can use a circle on your stencil as a guide and then pull the lines out and away from there.
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If you’re struggling with making smooth, straight lines, simple mountain tattoos are a perfect way to practice on real skin. You won’t have to pull a perfect line, since the rocky terrain already has that “wobbly” line.
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This easy nature tattoo has no shading and very simple linework. Because the leaves do not have any detailing, you can stay with the same tattoo needle throughout the piece.
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This seashell uses only two different line weights, making it a great tattoo if you have limited supplies.
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While this is a traditional piece, it doesn’t require much blending (the leaves have separate sections and the lemons can be blended (yellow and orange) or remain a solid yellow.
Easy Music Tattoos
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The challenge of this design is the linework (the detailing in the petals and on the wood surface). However, because of the easily recognizable shapes (the sunflower and the record player), a small slip-up won’t destroy the tattoo’s overall design.
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Music notes make for great beginner tattoos. They require no shading and you can easily thicken up any shaky lines.
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A design with piano keys that aren’t fully outlined prevents any keys from looking “uneven” or noticeably bigger than one another.
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Musical instruments are incredibly detailed images, so sticking to line work-only tattoos makes your job way easier while you’re learning.
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This design looks complicated, but it actually lets you create a fun design (even if you’re struggling with creating uniform pieces). If you look at this design, you can see the flags of each note are very similar - but none of them are perfect. This would be more noticeable if they were placed side-by-side.
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This traditional design lets you use simple lines to create depth in the design without having to incorporate any 3-D shading.
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With this record, you can avoid having to draw a perfect circle on the skin and by packing black in most of the design, you don’t have to outline each ridge on the record.
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Easy Traditional Tattoo Designs for Beginners
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American Traditional Rose Tattoo
Traditional-style roses are generally considered a “right of passage” for most new tattoo artists. They’re a classic design that features thick, solid lines, and only a few layers of petals, making it an easier starting point as you build up to more complicated work.
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Easy Black and Gray Flower Tattoo
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Nautical Star
You can make this tattoo easier or harder, depending on your skills and how much practice tattooing you’ve had. Instead of blending or using color, the star can alternate with no fill and straight black. Or, you can use black and gray shading on both sides to make the star appear metallic.
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This tattoo is a really great way to test if you can tattoo perfect lines. If you can master the nautical star, it’s a good indication that you can stop doing free tattoos and start charging for your work.
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Swallow Tattoos
You’ll see these swallows on most traditional flash sheets.
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Simple Black and Gray Rose Design
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Traditional Dagger Tattoo
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Arrow Tattoo
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Simple Flower Tattoo
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Easy Anchor Tattoo
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Challenge: Traditional Compass Tattoo
This compass is a great design to work up to after trying out the traditional star and azalea, as it incorporates elements of both of those designs. While it is a bit more complicated than the other traditional pieces in this list, it remains true to the traditional style with its foundational shading techniques and clear, bold lines.
Character Tattoos
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Deathly Hallows Tattoo from Harry Potter
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The stars at the bottom of each page in the Harry Potter books are also a popular design.
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Simple Mandalorian Tattoo
Rooting a design in traditional tattooing technique can make creating a character piece much easier, like with this image from Disney’s “Mandalorian.”
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Small BB-8 Tattoo
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Easy Batman Tattoo
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Easy Spiderman Tattoo
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Easy Spongebob Tattoo
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King Boo Tattoo
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Easy Simba Tattoo
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Small Aladdin Tattoo
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Superman Symbol Tattoo
BONUS: 5 Easy, Funny Tattoos
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Simple BFF Tattoo
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Simple Cat Tattoo
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Easy Funny Tattoo
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Simple Cat Tattoo
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Alien Best Friends Tattoo
5 Sentimental Tattoos
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Minimalist Memorial Tattoo
Tattooing an important date can make a big idea into a simple wrist tattoo. (Roman numerals recommended.)
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Key Tattoo
This idea works well for couples’ tattoos: first apartment, first home together, etc.
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Minimalist Sibling Tattoos
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Minimalist Travel Tattoo
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Easy State Tattoo
State outline tattoos help commemorate a place without any complicated images, making it a great choice if you’re still building up your tattooing skills. Simply place a heart shape in the design to symbolize the capital city, “where we met,” where the person was born, etc. Practice drawing the outline a few times, as small changes can make these tattoos hard to read.
Learn From Our Experienced Tattoo Artist Team With the Artist Accelerator
Starting off with simple tattoo ideas is an exciting step in your journey, but it can also be pretty eye-opening to how difficult tattooing can be. Without the right knowledge, it’s impossible to level up your skills and become a professional tattoo artist.
However, finding the straight-forward information you need to progress is difficult. And with so much out there online, it’s hard to avoid picking up bad habits from incorrect and outdated resources.
This is one of the biggest struggles new tattooers face, and too many talented artists have given up their goal of getting into tattooing because of the years it would take to unlearn their bad habits.
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