What’s New in March

As things pickup slowly with the nicer weather, we’re here to make your tattoo wishes become reality. Be it realism, watercolor, hand-poke, or anything in between, you can count on us for the most stunning living artwork around.

In March, every Friday and Saturday we’re featuring our hand-poke artist Kristina who still has some spots available. If you’ve never had a traditional hand-poke tattoo, this is your opportunity. Just reply to this email or call our tattoo studio anytime.

We’re also excited to start giving our Burlington apprentice Hanna more skin to play with. Her few tattoos so far have been absolutely stunning, we’ll be featuring some of her designs for free tattoo giveaways later this month. Her progress so far has been absolutely remarkable, we’re so excited to have her join us for the summer on a more full time basis as she perfects her already impressive skills.

We have big news about our line of natural soap and various products. We’re re-branding our entire catalog to Painted People Soap!

While Soapy Penguin will remain, we will be re-introducing it as a separate line of natural products in the future. For now, we wanted to further highlight that we do make all of the amazing products we sell from our shops and having a unified name just felt right.

We’re still on the looking for a new tattoo artist to join our Toronto family. We’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, Anita, who has quickly become a staple of Burlington artists, will continue to tattoo out of the Toronto location each Wednesday. She has a few openings available, so if you can’t make it to Burlington feel free to give us a call or email.

Finally, we were proud to celebrate having our 2000th client tattooed this past weekend. It still feels surreal to us, having opened the Toronto shop some 3+ years ago we’d be at this point. As one of our clients, no, members of our extended family, we want to say thank you! Thank you for sharing your love of art with us. Thank you for trusting us with something so intimate and personal.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, we of course would greatly appreciate your feedback and support for our Toronto or Burlington tattoo shops.

Thank you!

Estimates/Booking

Use the form below to describe your vision for the tattoo, or to request a consultation / booking. If looking for an estimate, please be descriptive and tell us about what you want to have tattooed. For bookings, review our Pricing & Payment page; we start with a free consultation; in order to begin your custom drawing a deposit is required.

Fill below out to tell us about a tattoo idea you had and for a chance to win your tattoo for free (must be 18 or over)

Asia

ABOUT ASIA

Asia, pronounced like Asha rather than like the continent, is the head artist and proud co-Owner of Toronto’s Painted People Tattoos Salon.

Asia has been tattooing for over 15 years. Her rich resume, apart from owning a tattoo studio, includes roles such as painter, volunteer, designer, music dabbler, and more. Finding her calling at the age of 16, she studied tattooing, first independently, and then as an apprentice to a number of celebrated artists before becoming one herself.

Tattooing is a passion for Asia. She loves creating livable, permanent art through that passion. When she’s not creating, Asia enjoys carrying for her pets, spending time with her family, watching movies, playing old video games, sucking at soccer (or football if we’re being all European) and unloading cat sounds with her husband Nick for general amusement of herself and others.

WATERCOLOR TATTOOS

As the name indicates, watercolor tattoos essentially represent using the human canvas and drawing on them with tattoo ink making them look like watercolors.

Watercolor tattoos require the same expertise and initial process that other tattoo techniques require (you may or may not do a stencil and mix shades of color), but where they really separate themselves from other tattoo techniques is the final outcome. A fresh watercolor tattoo can often appear as splashes of watercolor paint on your body.

Created with a lot more gradual coloring (unlike, for example, traditional tattooing where solid colors are merged together), the subtle gradients help create the characteristics and design of a classic watercolor painting. The other differentiating factor is outlining. Watercolor tattoos pride themselves on often not having a solid outline which is then colored in. The free flowing colors are meant to represent a painting – which they most definitely do.

Asia, while doing every style from black and grey, traditional, tribal, realism, neo-traditional, new school, etc, has really specialized in watercolor tattooing recently. Outside of loving the look and feel of them and genuinely enjoying creating unique watercolor designs, she is quickly becoming known Canada wide for her passion of watercolor tattoos.

One of the common misconceptions around watercolor tattoos is that they fade very quickly. Putting it simply, all tattoos fade overtime. In the hands of a professional tattoo artist (such as Asia), watercolor tattoos are safe from fading for years. How many years heavily depends on various factors such as maintenance of the tattoo / skin care along with placement of tattoo as not placing it on an area where there may be constant rubbing will make it last longer. Watercolor tattoos can fade just slightly quicker due to use of lighter colors, so if one of our tattoos does start to fade you can come back after a few years for a quick touch-up to get it looking vibrant again.

For tips on how to maintain your watercolor or any other tattoos, check out our healing instructions page here