02-25-2024 Harford Mag - Flipbook - Page 10
S P OT L I G H T
BY ABIGAIL GRUSKIN Harford Magazine
Amanda Graves owns Dark Arts Tattoo Studio with her husband, Corey Graves. Amanda works on a leg tattoo in her shop. PHOTOS BY LLOYD FOX
Her tattoos sparkle — without the glitter
Amanda Graves developed the technique in 2022
On Instagram and TikTok, Amanda Graves’ tattoos sparkle.
And yet there’s no real glitter involved — just a dizzying number
of tiny dots, an array of “all sorts of colors” applied with fine
needles.
When Graves started sharing her “glitter tattoo” technique on
social media a few years ago, “it just blew up,” she said.
A tattoo artist for nearly a decade, Graves opened her own
Bel Air shop, Dark Arts Tattoo Studio, with her husband, Corey
Graves, in January of 2020. After closing and then eventually reopening the studio during the coronavirus pandemic, she feared
it was “the end of tattooing.” But Dark Arts came back even
stronger than before.
The idea for Graves’ signature technique was sparked, she
said, by a desire to recreate the effect of her daughter’s glittery
competitive cheer makeup in tattoo form.
“I was scouring the internet, trying to see if anyone had done
something like this before, and I could not find it for the life of
me,” Graves, 33, said. “Did I actually create something that hasn’t
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| Spring 2024 | harfordmagazine.com
To mimic the visual effect of glitter, Graves employs a technique
called pointillism, layering white dots atop dots of other colors.