Maybe it’s in your skin since you were a teen, maybe it means a lot for you. Or is just something reminds you a perfect moment in your life. But what if you want to use your tattoo design for, let’s say, your logo, your business cards, a t-shirt or stationery. Let’s learn how to digitize a tattoo as a result a few simple steps.
How to digitize a tattoo: The software.
You’ll need two basic tools. A mobile phone or a digital camera, and a vector app or software. It’s important to use a “vector based” app, because this will give you the choice to save your tattoo as vectors. That way you can scale it to any size without loosing resolution or quality.
Most useful vector apps are:
- Adobe Illustrator
- Corel Draw
- Inkscape (free)
- Vectr (online)
We highly recommend to use Adobe Illustrator, since is the standard-tool for vector based illustrations and will allow you to save it in several vector file formats (including PDF which is the standard portable file for vectors).
Let’s do it.
Firstly, you need a good picture for your tattoo. The thing about taking pictures to tattoos is that surface is not always flat. And for perspective purposes it’s important the picture to be perfectly straight consequently your skin to make it as flatter as possible (if you need help ask someone to take the picture for you).
Let’s learn how to digitize a tattoo step by step:
- Place your picture into Adobe Illustrator (File > Place). Add some guides to align your picture (drag from the rulers placed on the margins of your document. If you don’t see the rulers, press cmd+R on Mac or Ctrl-R on PC)
- Select the pen tool (press P) and start placing nodes over the picture following the shapes. Sometimes you need to use your imagination to figure out details (tattoos are not perfect and contour is usually blurred).
By clicking and dragging with the pen tool (press P) you’ll be able to do curves, and pressing Alt on PC or Option on Mac you can edit node symmetry while tracing. Don’t panic, if the curve is not perfect you can edit it later. - If tattoo contains text, you can type it over (press T) and make it bigger to match the size of your tattoo’s font (Open the text panel by clicking Cmd-T on Mac or Ctrl-T on PC)
- You can figure out the font by open your font panel and finding the most similar one, or you can upload the picture to What’s the Font to see if that page helps you find the name of the font.
Sometimes font should be traced manually as the rest of the tattoo. - If the font does not match, you can edit it node by node converting it into curves (Type > Create Outlines)
- A cool trick to make a font bolder is to add a stroke to it. Just open the color panel and add a stroke with the same color as background.
- Once your drawing is done, delete the initial picture and save it. You can choose to save it as Illustrator or maybe as PDF, which is the standard for vector files and can be opened by anyone without needing Adobe Illustrator. You may also want to export a web-ready file. Just sabe it for web (File > Save for web) and choose PNG as file format. This file format will make a transparent-background version of the tattoo. That way you may place it over any background later on Facebook, Instagram, etc.
You can see the whole process about how to digitize a tattoo in this video below, and also you can grab the template file used on this video here
At Logotypers we’ve made many tattoo and drawing vectorizations and recreations. If you need help creating your digitized version of your tattoo, feel free to contact us by uploading your tattoo picture here