How Can You Practice Tattooing?

At the start of your tattooing journey, you will spend hours drawing on paper to practice your drawing skills. You will also be learning how to create stencils and how these will be used to produce a great-looking tattoo. 

As you’re perfecting your drawing skills you will need to practice drawing on other materials than paper. This will help you to get the feel for tattooing on the human body, and will also allow you to learn new styles and practice new ideas. Fruit is ideal for this as it has a great texture and lots of curves, and contours. 

People also use synthetic skins to practice their tattoo skills, and some even use pig skin as this has the closest texture to human skin. 

What Fruit Can I Practice Tattooing On?

Fruit is a great place to start when practicing your tattoo skills as they come in all different shapes, sizes, with different textured skins. This will give you a different perspective and result. Your mentor will recommend that this is where you should start practicing your skills.  

There are many different varieties of fruits to choose from, the best fruits to use would be oranges, grapefruits, lemons, or honeydew melons. These all have a great texture and you’ll find that the skin on honeydew melons is the closest you’ll find to the texture of human skin.

One problem with tattooing fruit that you’ll need to learn to overcome is stopping it from moving while you’re doing the tattoo. If you can keep the fruit perfectly still while tattooing it, it will give you great practice for tattooing a wriggly, moving person.

Why Should You Use Fruit?

The human body comes in all shapes and sizes and has curves, and contours that can make tattooing difficult. It’s completely different from drawing on a flat piece of paper and can be a huge challenge when starting out. 

Fruit is a great option to practice on as it also comes in all different shapes, textures, and sizes. The texture of the skin on honeydew melon is ideal for tattooing as it’s similar to the skin that you’ll be tattooing on a daily basis. 

For smaller tattoos, you can use a lemon and for those larger designs, a grapefruit or melon is your best bet. 

What Else Can You Use to Practice?

As well as using fruit to practice your tattooing skills you can also use skins to do this. You can now buy synthetic skins that are perfect to practice. They are sold in different-sized sheets and can also be shaped to different parts of the body, such as arms, hands, and feet. 

This gives you a much more realistic way of practicing and will help you perfect your skills. However, this can be expensive and the ink can’t always be removed easily from the skin to be able to re-use it. 

A cheaper alternative would be using pig skin to practice on as it has the closest texture to human skin. Some butchers will even give this to you for free so it can be a cheap way of practicing. However, the thought of using pig skin is not to everyone’s taste and it can be very smelly.

Another way of practicing would be to call on your friends and family. You need to make sure that you’re confident in your skills and the use of the needle before tattooing real people.  You should start by tattooing yourself, but you should do this on body parts that aren’t on show. You don’t want potential customers to see your first attempts as it may not be a great example of your tattoo skills.

Conclusion

The best way to improve your skills when learning to tattoo is to practice. Fruit is relatively inexpensive and comes in all different shapes, sizes, and textures so it’s the perfect option.

Grapefruits, oranges, lemons, and melons all give you the variety that you need to perfect your skills to become a great tattoo artist. We hope we’ve answered your question and wish you lots of luck!