Tattoo Artist Bang Bang Reviews Movie Tattoos, from ‘Moana’ to ‘Black Swan’ | Vanity Fair

hey I'm bangbang I'm a tattoo artist in New York City and today we're going to look at how tattoos can identify characters in film okay Ramblers let's get ramblin this is from dusk till dawn yeah I think this movie this tattoo really created a whole era of tattooing this tattoo has a lot of significance and you see it you see movies come after this where people have really large tribal tattoos and you see a bunch of people who are tattooed in the 90s that look like this guy you know it creeps up the neck this was the image everybody brought me when I first started tattooing I could glance at these guys walk in the street and tell you you got tattooed between 1993 and 1996 or you relate to the party and it's perfect for this character it's present for this time period it's perfect for this story it's perfect for him it's unique it doesn't remind you of anyone elses tattoos this one's pretty pretty accurate even the motion and flow and shapes are they're kind of not cohesive this is not a symmetrical tribal tattoo this looks like how tattoo artists made tribal in the 90s you know at the time of this scene of this setting of this character tattoos are still pretty taboo more than they are today I think it looks very real to me because I know if tattoos are done very perfectly they they can look very sharp and very dark especially contrasted next to skin but this time for this character I would expect to see more holidays in the tattoo and a holiday is what we call like a spot missing or an inconsistent spot and we call it a holiday cuz the psyche of tattoo artist took a day off right there so actually filling in a really large area solid black and consistent is really difficult some of what may make it look fake is that it looks too well done for this gangster on the run there's some things about this that are really good for the character don't go get this tattoo so this is Moana Maui which is my favorite representation of tattoos in film the tattoos themselves were a character in the film his tattoos are his conscious they're his better half and they spoke to him and encouraged him to do the right thing so often in film and even in life tattoos are painted in a negative light for Disney to include tattooing on a character first of all and then to do so where it was the voice of reason get chills think about it I love more they're also made very well so if you look really close at that film the tattoos have the inconsistencies that would be typical of that style of tattooing I'm certain that Disney consulted many tattoo artists and experts of tattooing in that style traditional Polynesian and it's hand poke they do it days on end it's like a rite of passage of ritual for young men Disney puts tons of research into doing things correctly you can tell it Dan in the fourth this is snatch and I love this movie I want to be him when I grow up oh my god what Kazan is just none of these are real right that face on his chest is woefully difficult for me to stare at but I feel like the film succeeds and this is the quality and work you'd expect on some Irish street fighter right who's trying to get his mother a caravan I can't tell what all of them are I don't know if that's good or bad so I can tell what the merry is on his chest one thing to consider his placement on the body has to fit the image his chest has a lot of shape to it a lot of definition it changing shape in the middle of a faces it doesn't help the image at all the tattoos on his shoulders actually look like they're made by the same person in the same moment which is appropriate for that design and his chest looks like it's just an outline but somebody didn't quite know what they're doing and whose skill level was lower than the tattoos on his shoulders do you have a bunch of different styles of tattoos of your tattoo throughout your life I just think that you know they wanted them to not look like the best tattoos in the world again it's for film so it's purposeful successful tattoos are supposed to like you know externally present the way somebody feels internally right and so there should be a visual representation of that person irish street fighter like this looks appropriate they get an a-plus on fitting form to the character this is the hangover part - it looks real because it looks like it's gonna hurt ya poor bastard The Hangover Part 2 is famous in itself for its lawsuit for this tattoo they did not acquire the rights to use this tattoo in this film from the tattoo artist technically if I designed this tattoo for Mike Tyson and I tattooed it on him Mike Tyson did not buy this design from me he bought the tattoo I still own the design for them to use that design in film without the tattoo artist permission it wound up costing them a lot of money let me say though they did a perfect job of making it look swollen and painful and what your face would tattoo would look like if you passed out in the bathtub drunk if we're speaking specifically about Mike Tyson's tattoo I love it it's a warrior mark I want homie over here though is a bad decision look it's perfect they just should have you know gotten the rights to it I think this is the place beyond the pines with Ryan Gosling yeah it takes somebody really either knows themselves or doesn't give up to get face tattoo any cheek tattoo is a bold tattoo first thing that I notice is some of the blacks they're not the equivalent of what pigment looks under skin our tattoo pigments sit under your skin pigments black is as black as it can be once it's under your pigment it's washed out it's lightened at first glance some of them looked too dark to be real so that's one thing that I catch right away it looks like he has a bunch of americana traditional style tattoos I think it's great when people when they're designing tattoos for these movie characters that it stays in theme it wouldn't make a ton of sense for him to have something super highly rendered and something super simple really next to each other it seems like this person has a style they like they know they identify with and they've stuck with so he has a boxer a stiff looking boxer that's traditional you know what you think of like Sailor Jerry tattoos that's the viable of this style is 1920s on the Bowery sailors coming off and getting tattoos and so there's still a big aesthetic and market for that now one thing I think could be improved on design stuff on this tattoo is his back tattoo it's not super clear that it's a ship to me I see the little cloud poof it's cute I get the horizon line when I look at a tattoo I want to know what it is in a snap if my brain has to spend some time trying to figure out that image I feel like that's time wasted on your first impression these tattoos don't particularly compliment his body I feel like maybe the bird on his chest as you know the closest one there's not clear thought path from one tattoo to another it's like what fills this spot I'll approach that leader on his hand I'm pretty sure that it's Frankenstein I think that that does not speak to the time period they're saying he got tattooed micro realism wasn't really a thing people were getting tattooed in the 90s so I think that tattoo would have been a lot bigger I think sometimes film studios don't consult tattoo artists a lot of this stuff's done by makeup artists they might miss some minor details like the fact that early mid 90s they just weren't doing tattoos this small with high detail so I think they got that correct on his neck doing it really big and open that was a pretty common thing in the 90s spiderweb on an elbows like a symbol of I went to jail in 1993 this is the girl with the Dragon Tattoo I'm a little embarrassed to say I didn't see this movie I think I'm the only person on earth that didn't see that movie but speaking to the work I like that it's form fits if it's her body really well they nailed the s-curve in design when you're learning about flow and motion 101 is the s-curve and everything kind of moving in that direction creates flow in something that's still your your tattoos still when it's on your body until your body starts to move we have many of these curves and angles on our body your color is the same angle as your rib cage is the same angle as your hips is the same angle as the muscle structures on your arm and so they all kind of lead into the center of you the spot that it's in is unique and I like that it hit certain curves and angles of her back it's very clear this dragons somebody studied that day of our class so I like when tattoos move body parts and bring your eye around a person so they make you interested in their form how that form of the design fits the body curves are feminine and that's you know how we identify them it's a medieval dragon the motion and flow of it it's not stiff you know still stagnant and muscular and presented in motion feels more feminine but I wouldn't inherently call it feminine tattoo there's a lot going on that I can't completely read the anatomy of everything in the image it's got these little t-rex claw there's some interesting Anatomy choices to the design it looks realistic it doesn't look like a really good tattoo most tattoos aren't really good so this is memento first thing I notice is many of them are upside down so they're clearly a message to himself the presentation of tattoos is for the viewer the audience people who are looking at you if you have a t-shirt on and it's all written upside down so you could read it people would think you're sure it's upside down I haven't seen that in film are they ever so it's really unique to this the top of his thigh doesn't look very real some of the smaller things don't look like real tattoos because of how dark they are how dense they are and tattoo settle in skin it's kind of like a sharpie on a paper towel it takes ten years really only when their very first made are they quite that sharp and even still there aren't many artists that can be digitally sharp these look in some cases digitally sharp [Music] this is red dragon what I love about this tattoo is you you know this guy's evil throughout the film you just know it's almost a reveal of his spirit in this tattoo it's done pretty well that close-up you could see that they put a lot of effort into making it really good certainly they could have added more contrast in mid-tones to make that shading look accurate and realistic he is the demon as he's decorated on his body again I don't always love the tattoos can kind of make the bad guy but seemingly he's a quiet misunderstood person at least at a glance throughout this film so what are his tells it's his reveal of him true is true self take this exact same scene without a tattoo and this is just the naked guy posing in front leaked the tattoo does so much in the scene to say just how pure and raw evil this man is oh yeah this is blade blades a badass I like blades tattoo it's like the only tribal tattoo I'm okay with I can't remember many characters before that or even famous people celebrities anything that had head tattoos so this is my first memory of someone with a well executed head tattoo that wasn't like a wrestler it spoke to the character I mean even his hairstyle was like as a Vampire Slayer I mean this is the tribal wave this is symmetrical tribal I prefer this symmetrical tribal over the kind of like organic travel that we saw um Clooney's arm and dusk till dawn it's complementing all these shapes it feels like armor it fits his muscle structure it fits his anatomy if it's a shape it fits his symmetry I think I would have made it a little less busy in his neck neck like your face gets a lot of Sun so your neck is darker more dense tattooing in smaller shapes leaves less room for the eye to breathe and in time that'll just be really hard to separate ink from skin and you won't see all those shapes as he ages the front of him looks much better so much more room to breathe if it were my input I would have more down into his chest just a couple more hard angles that face more towards middle you want to lead the eye towards the center swirls aren't aggressive like angles are aggressive it's a little bit lost in that it has angles and swirls it's like pick one bro I'm not gonna talk don't play this is once where warriors I mean I can tell right away that these are fake because of the consistency of pigment around the fingers and Knuckles as I'm looking at the guys in the car it doesn't look as realistic to me just because the consistency of the pigment on his knuckles and hands anytime someone gets their hands tattooed as it gets close to those knuckles you can see that pigment starts to fade I like what they're doing to set the scene of this person becoming right so here's this guy in the Middle East heavily tattooed people who are bigger than him but more presence than them or more intimidating than him they're visually representing this characters stage in this movie really well with his lack of tattoos when you get tattooed the Sun is breaking down your pigment your entire life especially on your face specifically speaking the guy on the right his face tattoos of a darkest portion of any of his tattoo so so a little bit of a Miss there these tattoos you know being tapped into somebody's face the level of precision is much lower than electric tattoo machines or modern tattoo machines his face tattoos look real to me because they're it looks like they're purposely done with inconsistency up on his forehead you can see inconsistencies in line weight thickness even spacing there's some errors in there that that I would expect to see on a tattoo of this scale made by hand there's also inconsistencies around his nose you can see the way that it's done looks like it has those errors right it's not fully filled in there's some ink fallout that's really typical of the space where the guys in the car those things just look a bit too dark to be on someone's face then there's chain-link guy you can also see that where his arm is rubbing against his outfit his clothes his the pigments rubbing off must have taken hours to put this on and it comes off real quick I just asked a question about this receipt this is stranger than fiction it's wind bars and clouds and wind bars are a Japanese technique of background fills space well you can move it in any direction you want - looks to me like an Americans take on a Japanese style tattooing cherry blossoms really stagnant flowers kind of placed all over the place with petals all over the place wind bars and clouds really fill space and you can move them in any direction to complement the tattoo this is a whole half sleeve of just background so we use flowers and we can use wind bars but like what's the subject matter there is no singular subject matter so when you study Renaissance painting they talk about the Trinity right bringing everything towards the center each one of these flowers is the same it's a it's a straight on shot of a cherry blossom there's none of them are missing leaves you have there's petals everywhere there's no different angles of them cherry blossoms are hard thing to do to draw and make beautiful and make flow and I like cherry blossoms and I like wind bars I just typically like them to support an image I thought this would have been made after 2003 4 5 something like that what year was it 2006 yeah that's a shocker at that time period like that was tattoo artists skill level and that was clients interest level and so like I think for film this is successful somebody showed me this picture and said do you think this is a real tattoo or a fake tattoo I'd say it's absolutely real this is Black Swan and I like our tattoo it's two flowers actually out of one stem doesn't make a lot of anatomical sense but like it's dope it's hard to see here but each one of those leaves has its own shape and depth although the shapes are symmetrical it's not perfectly symmetrical so each leaf on either side has is a little bit unique to itself so it's not like somebody drew half of it and fold it in half and then here's your symmetrical upper back stamp right I like the contrast of the flower portion to the leaves a lot of times that's something people miss is and tattoos we can vary flat as everything is done in the same tone this flowers kept really light and all the leaves are kept really dark so it's really easy to discern I think there's a really good chance they spoke to a tattoo artist about it and a good one because of what I can see in the contrast this technique something that takes tattoo artists many years to understand how to isolate something really light like a white flower how to put noise around it essentially so that that stands out how to make sure all that background in this case the leaves have sharp contrast from the flower so that you can read it you'd always catch that contrast I like the position of it as she moves her body that image is gonna move and it's gonna say flow and motion more than if she didn't have a tattoo this is a tattoo that would age well because of the contrast between flower and leaves probably makeup artists traditionally wouldn't have that much education on tattoos to be able to just whip that up and if they do I want to talk to that person it's they got a career in tattooin ahead of them yeah this is savages and this is this is the tattoo you don't want I mean it makes sense I feel like I've seen this tattoo a hundred times on like the Jersey Shore butterflies are great I really like butterflies ultimately it's a bunch of bugs which i think is funny as far as design and it looks like it matches this character I saw this person that is still and I looked at the tattoo they'd have I go yeah that's about what I expect so I feel like they nailed it there it's pretty common for tattoo artists that are using flash reference and that's the kind of pictures that are hanging on a tattoo shop wall to say like oh I'm gonna get a bunch of butterflies well great so the TED talks are gonna go over a rip down all the butterflies off the wall and trace each one of them to just make them fit together and that's exactly what this looks like it's weird overlaps so that it feels like one tattoo where they kind of barely intersect with the other and they all kind of do it as opposed to there were a bunch of butterflies on a bushing went whoosh and got them to all move away there'd be a lot more flow and beauty and cohesion this isn't something I would make on somebody but something I'd expect to see from somebody who doesn't have a lot of tattoo education control this movies divergent when I first saw it I couldn't tell what it was immediately and I thought it was too dark to be a real tattoo I still can't tell what it is I'm sure it was purposeful top bird and bottom bird of the same bird two different sizes that is a typical lazy tattoo artist thing to do flock of birds and you'll see many of the same one just at different sizes maybe they got that part right you know just on their own they don't they don't say birds to me these look like I'm gonna wipe it off and this is the night of the hunter I'm all about it this test who gets the green light from me nobody had tattoos in 1955 especially now on their hands the tools and precision of the 50s are not the same tools in precision of today the fact that you can read is what's impressive it looks like it was done without a stencil somebody grabbed his hand and l.o.v.e and just started to write from the cinematic perspective of where his hands are placed quite literally putting love really easy for her to read and then look at his other hand set back it's it's off Hangul so she's not so visually this is doing a lot for this scene this setting I think people don't realize just how much tattoos come into culture and kind of like squash the taboo a little bit and normalize it to people via film and so even though he's a villain it's normalizing a taboo art form why would you want to kill anybody I'll show you why [Music] so this is the Illustrated man if you show them to me I would guess they were real so they they did a good job and how muted those colors are speaks to really the raw form of pigments that tattoo artists used to use in the kind of the area that it was made this is really what you could expect out of getting a color tattoo very dull muted tones tattoo boldly and solidly for 1969 is cool I mean the title it's all about his tattoos not incredibly impressive tattoos the bar had been set at really well made sailor style tattoos traditional tattooing by that time it's tough for me to kind of put a finger on a genre of this kind of looks like a you know old couch those designs it was a little ornamental weird men weird tattoos yeah that's my boy no yes cuz I got it when I was in third grade my body grew this is not what would happen if you got a tattoo when you young and they grew as you did but it's hilarious tattoos grow with you if you got a tattoo at the center of your bicep and you gained a bunch of weight your tattoos not gonna grow as much as it's going to migrate forward because your skin stretches from the back your arm through your stretch marks right so it's gonna migrate forward and I'll no longer be in the center it's very much like if you took newspaper and silly putty and then you you know double it in size but not just upwards or it's kind of the whole thing would grow a bit and probably would migrate further up on your back because a lot of growth happens from skin stretching at the bottom of your back and then it's a high motion area just over time those those pigments would change a lot it wouldn't it wouldn't be this dark or sharp at all but hilarious the butterfly you Pepe I want you yeah this is Pepe I'll make up definitely did a good job this looks like a professional tattoo that's about 18 years old I'm sure it's not I hope it's not for his sake this would be very impressive for 1973 I feel like colors were really limited I have not seen a tattoo from the 70s with a vibrant purple colors tough to do through hair hairy chest purple butterfly on his chest all right [Music] so this is aqua man there's a couple things like when you take angles that don't fit the body like these angles that move across his chest it's really straight lines it kills some of his shape of his arms of his muscle structure of his chest here but then they accent it by really reinforcing the shape of his chest here so you know it's like two things fighting each other a little bit there the abrupt end and the abrupt start there are things that if they were a real tattoo that we would look at and say that that was unsuccessful tattooing darkness under a man's chest makes it makes his chest look more like breasts so it adds a shadow under chest so typically we don't accent that portion of men this is not gonna spark a tattoo trend maybe nor should it I'm not a huge fan of companies that go off just mimicking what tattoo artists are experts in I would prefer that tattoo artists did this personally if you went through that much trouble to get to the precision of flattening out a 3d figure of his body that the precision of the work could have been better movie made money right I think film has done a great job in normalizing tattoos for people they're making these tattoos to identify this character in their past and their experience and their style all those things wrapped together are what we judge when we see people with tattoos in regular life I hope you learned something I hope you've taken something away from this and I hope you're as passionate about tattoos as I am I would have asked him to consult his therapist this guy's clearly crazy find him kill him across his chest like if you come to my store and ask a tattoo that on you I'm turning you in

Channel: Vanity Fair

Views: 4,254,754

Rating: 4.9359498 out of 5

Keywords: bang bang, bang bang tattoo, vanity fair reviews, tattoo artist reviews, tattoo artist bang bang, tattoos in films, tattoos in movies, keith bang bang mccurdy, keith mccurdy, bang bang tattoos, bang bang nyc, moana tattoos, bang bang reviews movie tattoos, from dusk till dawn, moana, snatch, girl with the dragon tattoo, black swan, aquaman tattoos, tattoo review, tattoo artist, tattoo expert, tattoo styles, fake tattoos, movie tattoo, movie tattoos, blade, vanity fair

Id: Kb09lybZEeA

Length: 24min 26sec (1466 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 26 2019