How blast over is experiencing its heyday in tattoo culture (2024)

Blast-overs are tattoos that reconstruct your body art regrets, like a kind of make-up that leaves the previous work visible under the new artwork. Unlike traditional ‘cover-ups’, which remove it completely, these allow the tattoos etched into your skin to evolve in parallel with your aesthetic vision.

This may have become the current or latent movement within the tattoo world, based on working on existing designs, in order to give them a new meaning through representations -usually in black- or negative spaces that allow glimpses of the old tattoos.

Just as our identity evolves with the passage of time, our tattoos can also be synchronized with this transformation, either because of fashion influences or because they no longer represent us. It is then a way to overcome the past and be reborn in an intentional way, defying the very essence of the tattoo, based on remaining forever.

Within the trend, there are tattoos that take the definition of blast-over to the limit, covering almost all of an existing piece, but leaving just enough to serve as a souvenir. However, the usual thing is to slightly cover the previous tattoo through layers, in which each one of them works perfectly separately and organically as a whole. Of course, the new piece must stand out from the previous one, becoming a sort of background for the maximalist work.