Tattoos have their enduring style, whether fine-line or small tattoos like microharms that we’ve seen on style icons like Bella Hadid and Hailey Bieber. Among the 2024 tattoo trends, we can expect to see new tattoo sleeves.
Typically, tattoo sleeves have been known to be large masterpieces. We’ve seen Justin Bieber and David Beckham’s tattoo sleeves, filled with detailed inkwork that serves your entire arm, from shoulder to wrist.
This traditional tattoo artwork reflects our changing times—it’s far more graphic, minimal, and sleek to reflect our taste in style and design. One tattoo artist creating the future tattoo sleeve is South Korean artist Taesok Park, who works at Souled Out tattoo parlour in Vancouver. Park makes a landscape of memories based on a client’s stories around a particular moment. He calls these sleeves “memory maps.”
“Clients send me images related to their family and their most treasured personal belongings for tattoos,” said Park. “People or objects always have strong personal memories; I even incorporate paintings or songs they’ve liked since childhood.”
In one of his tattoo sleeves, a client asked to incorporate the anatomy of a hand, a unique plant that holds personal meaning to her, and movie stills, which he inked realistically. “Bringing all these memories together isn’t easy,” he said. “Customers ask for images that mean so much to them, and it’s my job to turn them into a composition that matches well with their body shapes.”
Park starts by creating a map of memories based on what a client tells him. “It’s usually from personal experiences, like getting married or the story behind their pet,” he said.
His artwork combines elements of someone’s past to create a landscape of memories. “It’s like a storytelling sleeve,” said Park.
Another one of his tattoo sleeves includes images of dinosaurs, flower bouquets, phrases in foreign languages, and dates that mark special days. He brings it all together into a black-and-white sleeve that is graphic. “The images here were all related to the client’s family,” he explains. “The five dragons depict each family member, and the bouquet is the family’s birth flower. The marine logo represents their grandfather.”
His process starts with working the memories into the anatomy of the arm. “When clients send me multiple images, I prioritize based on their preferences,” said Park. “After deciding the main image, we determine the next important image to go in the background.”
It isn’t just personal memories but creating maps of memories based around a famous artist or slice of time in history, whether it’s storytelling around Leonardo di Vinci’s career and illustrious life or tales around ancient history, be it the lives of famous explorers, to an inventor, or a popular figure from a person’s home country. “I love using geometric lines as a basis for my sleeves,” said Park. “I play around with geometric lines to make arms or legs look longer or the back to look broader.”
It all comes down to a select number of images representing your past or a theme you want to go with for a sleeve. “The clearer we select the theme, the cooler the design turns out,” said Park. “So, if it’s something straightforward like Greek mythology, Egyptian history, or even a Marvel series, I can easily pick out the main, sub-theme and background to create a design with a stable composition.”
Another tattoo sleeve he recently created depicts a dog, a Welsh Corgi, alongside a motorcycle, representing freedom, alongside a map of the client’s home country. “I also found a way to incorporate their favourite song, too,” said Park.
A hot topic for sleeve designs has been art history. “I’ve had clients trust me to ink entire sleeves based around Baroque and Renaissance arts,” he said. “The sleeves portray the lives of great artists, like Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio, and feature their most iconic works as the main themes.”
Sometimes, there’s a general theme that Park has to work around. “One client just wanted a sleeve themed around ‘nature and the universe,’” said Park. “I love working with large, overarching themes like that because it gives me total freedom with the design.”
The typical tattoo sleeve is changing due to the rise of micro tattoos, minimal graphic designs and thin linework. It also keeps one focus area, with the others falling into the background. Clients must be alright with that, Park explains. “When there are too many main images the client wants, the balance is broken,” he said. “It’s just like how not all characters in the movie can be the main character.”
