Design library · Style

Negative Space tattoo designs

The design is the skin you don't ink. Solid or patterned black surrounds an untouched silhouette, and the eye does the rest, a reversal that makes even familiar motifs read as new.

Every motif in Negative Space

111 motifs, each drawn once in this style. Open a design to see it large, or follow the motif through all twenty-three styles.

What Negative Space does to a motif

The motif is the skin you leave open; the ink around it does the drawing. Read best at a distance and age well, because the subject can't blur, it was never inked.

The other styles

Every motif in this library is drawn in all twenty-three. Compare the same subject across them.

Make your own negative space design

These are reference designs. In the AI Tattoos app you can generate your own version of this motif, restyle it with one tap, and see it on a photo of your own skin with the depth-aware Studio before you book anything.

About these designs

This is a reference library, not a shop. Nothing here is for sale and no tattoo can be ordered from this page. Take a design to a professional tattoo artist, who will adapt it to your body, your placement and their own hand. Meanings attached to motifs are cultural and vary between traditions; where a motif belongs to a living tradition, read about it before wearing it.