Pinterest used to be the place to find your next tattoo design, but now TikTok is taking over. Post-pandemic tattoos are trending, and if you are looking to get inked, you have to stay in the know with all the best trendy tattoos on TikTok. They are posting everything, from their design and planning to the actual tattooing. Tattoos are the perfect way to express your individuality, pay tribute to loved ones and… probably anger your parents. But like all things, tattoo trends change throughout time. Whether you’re influenced by celebrity trendy tattoos or by what you see on social media, no doubt there’s always a tattoo trend to hop on.

There’s a corner of TikTok focused on pretty much every interest, so it should come as no surprise that people who are passionate about tattoos have found a home on the platform.

Here are some of the most popular and trendy tattoos on TikTok.

trendy tattoos

Venom tattoo

You’ve probably seen lots of people sharing their “Venom” tattoos on TikTok and, no, it has nothing to do with poisonous snakes or other venomous creatures. Venom tattoos are trendy tattoos now because people have noticed that if you write it in a specific font the word can look like “Women” upside down. It won’t work if you just write the word in a normal font, but if you get a little artistic, it actually makes a really cool tattoo.  It’s now being used as a symbol of empowerment among women.

It might look like a magic trick or sorcery but a good tattoo artist will be able work out a way to write it into a font that spells both “venom” and “women” interchangeably. Don’t worry, if you don’t feel like you want to commit to having “Venom” permanently etched into your skin you can simply use a pen.

Believe it or not, the tattoo trend has actually been turned into a challenge. People are showing off their new ink to the song ‘Venom’ by Little Simz. The song is actually from Little Simz’s 2019 album Grey Area and is all about misogyny.

Stick-and-poke tattoo

Blame it on pure freaking boredom or TikTok culture, but DIY tattoos are trendy tattoos right now, and even celebrities are into it. Meanwhile, on TikTok, a quick “stick-and-poke” search pulls hundreds of videos of hand-poked tattoos, most from the past four weeks alone, all showing Gen Zers and millennials giving themselves and their friends DIY designs, some with truly questionable results.

And even though hand-poked trendy tattoos might look kind of intuitive and low-risk, they’re surprisingly…not. First things first: Stick-and-poke tattoos aren’t just something your ex-boyfriend gave his friends in high school, but it’s a professional technique that involves hand-poking ink into the skin without the use of electric tools. With stick-and-pokes, the needle is dipped into ink and then poked into the skin, so the tattoo is made entirely out of dots. Because it’s difficult to build solid lines with dots, the tattoo can sometimes look less solid or daintier on the skin, although the finish is entirely dependent on the artist.

That “imperfect” aesthetic is what attracts most people to stick-and-poke tattoos, in fact there are plenty of professional stick-and-pokers out there whose work looks like it could’ve been done with a machine.

Moving optical illusion tattoo

These trendy tattoos are making TikTok trip out. There’s nothing freakier than witnessing something moving that shouldn’t be. In this case, that something is a tattoo covered by a strange sack of ink. When TikTok user Kristen Berner showed off her new tattoo and oscillating ink in a sack that covered it, people had questions. The video, which now has over 81 million views, shows Berner running her hand over her new thigh tattoo and its current sack, moving the ink back and forth to show off its creepiness in full-effect.

Medusa tattoo

As it turns out, there’s a deeper, symbolic meaning behind those trendy tattoos. Medusa tattoos are popping up all over TikTok.

Those familiar with Greek mythology likely know that Medusa was a mythic figure who was capable of turning a man to stone with just a look. Oh, and she had snakes for hair. Although there are likely a million different reasons to get a Medusa tattoo, the most common one on TikTok right now is designed to invert the narrative that women should be punished or blamed in the wake of being sexually assaulted. In some tellings of Medusa’s story, she was raped by Poseidon, and then punished by Athena because of it. Now, women are reclaiming her as a figure of strength and empowerment.

Historically, the figure of Medusa has been used to ward off evil. Medusa, who is often evil herself in these tellings, is used as a figure to repel other evil forces. Now, many are claiming that Medusa is not an evil figure, but a strong person who had to overcome enormous pain and trauma. Although she never actually existed, her story is one that many women on TikTok have found themselves relating to.