5 of Our Favorite L.A.-based Tattoo Artists/Studios!

Los Angeles is a city overflowing with creativity, and its tattoo scene is no exception. From bold, graphic designs to soft, intricate pieces, the city is full of artists with unique styles and strong creative identities. This guide highlights standout tattoo artists and studios whose work merits recognition!

1. Maddi Tatti 

The artist blends organic, flowing, botanical-inspired linework that often drifts, branches, and flows across the skin. The pieces feel soft and airy, yet also sharp, abstract, and experimental. Their work often includes forms that resemble plants, stars, butterflies, and tiny constellations, creating a dreamy and whimsical feel. 

2. Dirt LA 

This studio’s aesthetic is bold, surreal, and deeply sculptural; their work blends alien anatomy, fantasy weapon shapes, flowing metal, and botanical forms, but abstracted. Many of the tattoos look almost alive, resembling bones, tendons, wings, or strange organic structures that twist and stretch in a 3-dimensional way. There is also a heavy use of smooth black-to-gray gradient shading that creates a 3D, almost metallic or bone-like surface. 

3. Angel Kisses Studio

This studio possesses a quirky, playful, nostalgic, and illustrative tattoo style that includes classic flash-inspired shapes like stars, skulls, lamps, and goblets, but rendered in a soft and quirky, almost storybook way. Often slightly spooky but still sweet, their pieces are very episodic and narrative-driven — almost like tiny characters or items from a surreal children’s book.

4. Horrrhaus 

This artist creates tattoos whose style can be best described as ASCII-inspired dotwork; the designs are built entirely out of keyboard symbols — numbers, percent signs, slashes — to form a bigger image, whether that be a butterfly, cartoon character, fruit, or an abstract shape. Rather than creating a clean image, the characters are scattered in a way that feels glitchy and digital, giving the tattoo a slightly pixelated and deconstructed feel. 

5. Nightschool Tattoo 

This studio’s work blends fantasy, femininity, and gothic edge into a unique visual style. Their tattoos often feature a powdery, airbrushed quality, and their flash and custom pieces mix dark, gothic, and fantasy visuals with cartoon-inspired characters and whimsical motifs like hearts, bows, and stars.