Tattoos have their own enduring style, whether it’s fine line tattoos or small tattoos like micro hearts that we’ve seen on style icons like Bella Hadid and Hailey Bieber. Among the 2024 tattoo trends we can expect to see also includes a new kind of tattoo sleeve.
Typically, tattoo sleeves have been known to be large masterpieces on their own. We’ve seen Justin Bieber and David Beckham’s tattoo sleeves, which are filled with detailed ink work that fills your entire arm, from shoulder to wrist.
Now, this traditional tattoo artwork is reflecting our changing times—it’s far more graphic, minimal, and sleek to reflect our taste in style and design. One tattoo artist who is creating the tattoo sleeve of the future is South Korean artist Taesok Park who works at Souled Out tattoo parlor in Vancouver. Park makes a sort of landscape of memories based on a client’s stories based around a special moment in their life. He calls these sleeves “memory maps.”
In one of his tattoo sleeves, a client asked to incorporate the anatomy of a hand, a special plant that holds personal meaning to her, and movie stills, which he inked in a realistic way. “Bringing all of 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 out 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 brings together elements of someone’s past to create a sort of landscape of memories. “It’s like a storytelling sleeve,” he said.
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 in nature. “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 own 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 that represent 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 Marvels series, I can easily pick out the main, sub-theme and the background to create a design with a stable composition.”
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.”
Tattooed Mag 