Easy Tattoos For Beginners: Designs & Ideas | Tattooing 101 (2025)

The best way to get comfortable with the feel of working on skin - and the best way to avoid leaving behind a bad tattoo - is to start with easy tattoos for beginner artists.

Easy Skull Tattoo Designs for Beginners

Most tattoo artists will tell you that the perfect tattoo for your very first tattoo will be a small, easy-to-hide design. This simple tattoo can be kept tiny and lets you avoid the trickiest parts of tattooing skulls: the shading and the teeth.

The simple tattoo design lets you play with angles...without dealing with the 3-D aspect. Use simple lines to create a grin and add personality with easy, single-line “eyebrows.”

Most artists learn American traditional designs first because they use bold lines and a limited color palette. This skull lets you practice clean linework and shading without asking you to blend lots of different colors.

Easy Tribal Tattoos for Beginners

Tribal is all about thick, dark lines that flow with the body. While simple and fairly easy to apply, this type of design allows you to create a stellar-looking piece without incorporating lots of detail. Simply align the design with the flow of the body to accentuate the curve of a muscle.

Cute Tattoo Ideas for Beginners

Easy Animal Tattoo Ideas

Easy Space Tattoos

Simple Nature Tattoos for Beginners

This sun lets you use negative space so that you don’t have to draw a circle with your tattoo machine. You can use a circle on your stencil as a guide and then pull the lines out and away from there.

If you’re struggling with making smooth, straight lines, simple mountain tattoos are a perfect way to practice on real skin. You won’t have to pull a perfect line, since the rocky terrain already has that “wobbly” line.

This easy nature tattoo has no shading and very simple linework. Because the leaves do not have any detailing, you can stay with the same tattoo needle throughout the piece.

This seashell uses only two different line weights, making it a great tattoo if you have limited supplies.

While this is a traditional piece, it doesn’t require much blending (the leaves have separate sections and the lemons can be blended (yellow and orange) or remain a solid yellow.

Easy Music Tattoos

The challenge of this design is the linework (the detailing in the petals and on the wood surface). However, because of the easily recognizable shapes (the sunflower and the record player), a small slip-up won’t destroy the tattoo’s overall design.

Music notes make for great beginner tattoos. They require no shading and you can easily thicken up any shaky lines.

A design with piano keys that aren’t fully outlined prevents any keys from looking “uneven” or noticeably bigger than one another.

Musical instruments are incredibly detailed images, so sticking to line work-only tattoos makes your job way easier while you’re learning.

This design looks complicated, but it actually lets you create a fun design (even if you’re struggling with creating uniform pieces). If you look at this design, you can see the flags of each note are very similar - but none of them are perfect. This would be more noticeable if they were placed side-by-side.

This traditional design lets you use simple lines to create depth in the design without having to incorporate any 3-D shading.

With this record, you can avoid having to draw a perfect circle on the skin and by packing black in most of the design, you don’t have to outline each ridge on the record.

Easy Traditional Tattoo Designs for Beginners

Traditional-style roses are generally considered a “right of passage” for most new tattoo artists. They’re a classic design that features thick, solid lines, and only a few layers of petals, making it an easier starting point as you build up to more complicated work.

You can make this tattoo easier or harder, depending on your skills and how much practice tattooing you’ve had. Instead of blending or using color, the star can alternate with no fill and straight black. Or, you can use black and gray shading on both sides to make the star appear metallic.

This compass is a great design to work up to after trying out the traditional star and azalea, as it incorporates elements of both of those designs. While it is a bit more complicated than the other traditional pieces in this list, it remains true to the traditional style with its foundational shading techniques and clear, bold lines.

Character Tattoos

Rooting a design in traditional tattooing technique can make creating a character piece much easier, like with this image from Disney’s “Mandalorian.”

BONUS: 5 Easy, Funny Tattoos

5 Sentimental Tattoos

Tattooing an important date can make a big idea into a simple wrist tattoo. (Roman numerals recommended.)

This idea works well for couples’ tattoos: first apartment, first home together, etc.

State outline tattoos help commemorate a place without any complicated images, making it a great choice if you’re still building up your tattooing skills. Simply place a heart shape in the design to symbolize the capital city, “where we met,” where the person was born, etc. Practice drawing the outline a few times, as small changes can make these tattoos hard to read.

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