Do Tattoos Make Your Muscles Look Bigger?

Tattoos can not make you look more muscular, but they can make certain parts of your body more round and make your muscles more visible. Gaining muscle will stretch your skin, but it usually won’t warp a tattoo enough to warp its appearance. Some tattoos can accentuate your muscles, making you look physically stronger, but the effects are limited. A tattoo will visually push that area back in space, making it look smaller or shadowed.

Tattoos and muscles go hand in hand, but what happens to tattoos as you bulk? The skin stretches, where, and how to avoid ruining your ink. Larger tattoos (sleeve tattoos) cover a significant portion of your muscle, covering contours and shadows created by the muscles in those areas. Forearms likely won’t grow big enough to ruin your tattoo. The biggest concern would be the muscle definition and palpable veins if you get lean and muscular, but judging by the placement, that shouldn’t cause an issue either.

Tattoos, especially on the arms, can create an illusion of increased size by covering a significant portion of the arm with intricate designs. They can help accentuate your strong points, either by getting inked on the positive space, the muscle itself, or the negative space, the area surrounding the main muscle.

Tattoos will look no different with gaining or losing mass, not unless it is extremely drastic in the area of a couple hundred pounds. However, these tattoos can obstruct the curvature of your arms, and if you have an athletic build, the fine details of the ink might be lost on muscular arms. A tattoo can also be designed in a manner that adds to the “roundness” of the body part, making it appear more muscular than it really is.