Forget about black-and-white tattoos; watercolor ink is now the gold standard in the tattoo industry.

Robson Carvalho, a skilled tattoo artist, is based in São Paulo, Brazil. His artistic style is characterized by a wide range of adjectives, including scrappy, free, watercolor-infused, and pastel-like. Carvalho’s tattoos often appear as if they’ve been lifted straight from his sketchbooks, and in many cases, that’s precisely what happened. His work captures a free-form pen technique, giving the impression that instead of using a tattoo machine, he traced a doodle with a marker and brush. The imperfections add to the artwork’s charm: some lines are muted, some colors fade, and there are ink splatters as if the pen nib had slipped and fallen.

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