12 classic tattoo styles you need to know There are probably thousands of styles of tattoos around now, with talented artists creating their own every day. But a lot of those designs are adapted from certain historically popular tattoo styles—many of them decades or even centuries old. Here are twelve of the classic styles of tattoo art, the ones you definitely want to know before you start getting into tattoo design. If you’re looking for the perfect tattoo style, you may not be able to use the exact terminology of what you want, but in all likelihood you’ll have one of these in mind already. Figuring out how exactly you want your perfect tattoo to look like is hard, but we hope the styles below will help you narrow it down.