Sleeve Tattoos
A sleeve tattoo basically refers to any type of tattoo that completely covers the skin in the mentioned area. Typically sleeve tattoos are done on the arms and they can come in a variety of lengths. A full sleeve tattoo being form the shoulder blade all the way down to the wrist. A half sleeve then is from the shoulder to the elbow and a quarter sleeve is typically from the elbow to the wrist.
The word sleeve comes from clothing and it is a direct relation to the area on a shirt you call a sleeve that covers your arms. Therefore a sleeve tattoo essentially covers your arm as a shirt sleeve would. However, in a lot more artistic style and flair!
Half-sleeves or quarter-sleeves are tattoos that cover only part of an arm, usually above the elbow, but can also be found below the elbow. The term "sleeve" implies complete tattoo coverage of a particular area, so a "half sleeve" is a tattoo that covers the entire upper or lower arm. A "quarter sleeve" usually covers the area of skin from the shoulder midway to the elbow.
Sleeve tattoos are collaboration between a tattoo artist and customer to demonstrate a personal and unified artistic theme. Other times, a sleeve is created when a person has many smaller tattoos on his/her arm and later has them "connected" with background tattooing to form a sleeve. Pre-planned sleeves generally require many long hours of tattooing and can take weeks, months or years to complete.
One way that sleeve tattoos occur is kind of on accident. People start by getting one or two tattoos and they quickly find themselves addicted. They then continue getting tattoos in the area until most of their arm is filled with a bunch of individual tattoos. Often at this point people still want more tattoos so they design a way to connect up all of the individual tattoos into one large sleeve tattoo.
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