Tattoo fonts – How to Pick the Right One

Choosing the right tattoo font is just as important as choosing the right design for your image. The writing of your tattoo can help set the theme for your ink and can add a ton of creativity and personality. You want the right tattoo font for your design, but how do you choose? At Chronic Ink tattoo, we strive to be one of the best tattoo parlours in the world and we get there by not skipping over a single aspect of tattoo design, including tattoo fonts.

That’s why we’ve put together this guide on tattoo fonts and what to avoid so that we can help you get the tattoo design that truly suits your personality.

Premade tattoo fonts

There are a number of websites dedicated to tattoo fonts, most of them are free, but some of them charge for the license to use a specific font. The advantage of using a premade tattoo font are:

• You can see how the font looks on an existing tattoo
• The design of each letter will be uniform
• It takes much less time for a tattoo artist to learn a font that already exists

The disadvantage, however, is that your tattoo may not be as unique as you’d like. As well, you may have to pay for the licensing rights to use a particular premade tattoo font.

Custom tattoo fonts

Getting a custom tattoo font for your ink is the best way to keep your design unique. If you have your mind set on custom tattoo fonts, we usually start by showing you some examples of tattoo fonts that we’ve made in the past. What we’re looking for is your reaction so that we can figure out the design nuances that you’re looking for. Do you prefer aggressive tattoo fonts with sharp edges or a more cursive design with lots of swirls? These are the questions we’re looking to help you answer when you come in.

What to watch out for

It bears repeating that you don’t want to show up on one of these lists. Even a tiny error in the font can quickly spell disaster for your design. Watch out for these two common mistakes when choosing your tattoo fonts:

Spacing: Make sure that your chosen tattoo font leaves space between each letter. While it might look ok right after getting inked, it’s very common for letters spaced too closely together to bleed into each other.

Spelling: I can’t stress this enough, check and recheck the spelling of your tattoo script. Even have your friends check it over if you can.

Most importantly however, make sure that you take the time to go over your tattoo font expectations with your artist. They know a lot more about how fonts look on skin then you may think and they’ll be able to tell you whether a font will look good on your arm or not.