With his own skin as his canvas and needles as his tools, artist David Cata demands a pound of flesh from himself in return for his creative expression. That is to say, each individual piece takes a toll that may require a healing period before he can begin another – something that can’t be said about most other kinds of artistic media. Previously known for embroidering photographs of his family members onto his palms, Catá now turns to scenery and still life as his subjects of choice.

But don’t worry, it isn’t too painful, and only barely draws blood. Working just on the surface with the layer of skin that’s mostly dead and easy to pierce, Catá typically ‘sketches’ whatever’s right in front of him, whether that’s the sleeping figure of a woman in bed, photos of his relatives, a snowy landscape or – as in the case of his most recent piece, Horizonte 07. La Musicá – the keys of a piano. He has also sewn tiny pockets for soil into his skin to support seedlings.

The artist leaves his works in place for mere minutes, recording their creation or photographing the results before ripping out the stitches. He says the resulting ‘tracks’ stay on his body for about four weeks. In an interview with Citizen Brooklyn, he said, “Somehow, all of the portraits I’ve done are permanently living on me, even if they are not visible. Each print is latent on my body. But, if I had to pick one, I’d keep my great-grandmother Perpetua’s portrait.”

Modern tattoos are less about sailors, pin-ups and ‘MOM’ and more about bold black lines, complex geometry, architecture, esoteric imagery, glitches and even blacking out entire body parts to cover up old work. These standout themes represent some of the most visually striking, imaginative and artistically challenging styles gaining popularity in recent years.

Black & White Snake Tattoos by Mirko Sara

Alone, white ink isn’t the greatest choice for a tattoo, according to many artists: it looks splotchy and uneven on all but the clearest, most evenly pale skin, fades quickly, and has a tendency to disappear into a blurry mess within a short period of time. But if you’re willing to get it touched up often to maintain it, it can be really beautiful, and it sets off black ink beautifully. Take the work of artist Mirko Sata for example – whose most common subjects are intertwined snakes.

Blackout Tattoos

What do you do when you’ve got a large number of old tattoos you want to get rid of? Laser surgery is an option for the removal of smaller tattoos, but some people get beyond that whole ‘permanent’ aspect of inking the skin in a different way. Blackout tattoos are growing increasingly popular, blocking out large areas of the body with solid swaths of black ink.

Though the lines from the old tattoo still tend to show through, and several painful sessions are often required, the look can be pretty incredible. Some people get blackout tattoos on virgin skin just for the dramatic effect. Tattooers working in this style include Chester Lee of Oddtattooer, Alex Arnautov, Simon Mora, Josh Stephens and Kenji Alucky.

White Ink Over Black Work

Fresh white ink applied over healed blackwork can also be a fun way to cover up old mistakes, and the contrast is pretty incredible right after it’s applied. Subjects have to sit for as many as five sessions to go over the white ink to make it opaque enough to stand out, and it can take years to finish a single piece. Artists who have experimented with this process include Esther Garcia, Nathan Mould, Ruslan Batyrbaev and Wayne Fredrickson.

Architectural Designs

Architecture can be a particularly striking tattoo theme, especially when it takes up large areas of the body. Artist Maxime Buchi of M-X-M has tattooed traditional Russian architecture across people’s backs, arms, legs and chests, and someone loved Haight Ashbury enough to get imagery of the famous San Francisco intersection inked onto their body by the tattoo studio of the same name. Dmitriy Tkach depicted a Victorian house with roots wrenched from the ground like a plant, while Wang Lei designed an intricately shaded classical church. Thieves of Tower, appropriately enough, often tattoos spindly towers onto their subjects.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Modern Markings 42 Bold Black White Tattoo Designs

If you were to pass a bunch of colorfully-dressed human figures crammed into a crawlspace beneath a public staircase, you might think they’re mannequins at first, with their splayed limbs and claustrophobic positioning. The bodies are bent every which way, some hanging upside down, all of their faces obscured by hoodies, their positioning absurd. As you walk down the street, you spot more and more of them – folded beneath park benches, dangling from staircase railings, squeezed between utility boxes or piled on top of one another. But then a hand moves, or a muscle twitches, and you realize they’re alive.

The brilliance of choreographer Cie. Willi Dorner’s ‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ lies as much in the chosen setting as it does in the extraordinary flexibility of his performers. Dressed in vivid track suits, the performers quickly assemble themselves into position, hold their poses for an uncomfortably long duration, and then disassemble themselves to run ahead to the next spot and repeat the process. The temporary urban interventions leave no trace when the performance is over, and aim to encourage residents to experience their cities in a different way.

‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ has been traveling the world since 2007, showing up all over the UK and Europe as well as Texas, New York, Istanbul, Russia and Japan. The performers lead an audience through each city, highlighting various architectural and urban features and how we interact with them as human bodies.

“‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ is a temporary intervention in diversified urban architectonical environment,” says Dorner. “The intention of ‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ is to point out the urban functional structure and to uncover the restricted movement possibilities and behavior as well as rules and limitations. By placing the bodies in selected spots the interventions provoke a thinking process and produce irritation. Passers by, residents and audience are motivated and prompted to reflect their urban surrounding and their own movement behavior and habits.”

Human figures blend into iconic New York City scenes, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Guggenheim Museum, in artist Trina Merry‘s tromp l’eoil urban camouflage works. Each subject is carefully posed against a backdrop and painted in place to virtually disappear.

The work is reminiscent of that of Liu Bolin, the Beijing-based artist known as the ‘Invisible Man,’ who spends hours studying his chosen locations and painting himself and other subjects. It’s also another amazing example of surreal and sometimes mind-bending works of art that use human bodies as canvas.

“My surface is living, breathing human beings making this a highly relevant & immediate medium,” says Merry. “The painting is temporary, like a Tibetan sand painting, beginning to change into another work as soon as I stop painting, changing texture & color.”

“For this reason highly intentional photography has become an important part of documenting my work… likewise, I work with y human canvases on poses, creating new opportunities for line & Form. My work is sometimes experienced live as an installation, for example, at museums, or preserved through photographs as limited edition fine art prints.”

Three-dimensional human bodies are transformed to look like paintings on a flat surface in this curious collaboration between a makeup artist, a photographer and a retoucher. In his series Art of Face, Alexander Kholkhlov explores the ways in which people can function as canvases, using body paint to obscure their humanity.

For a set entitled ‘2D or Not 2D?’ makeup artist Valeriya Kutsan applies body paint in such a way that it’s sometimes near-impossible to tell that what you’re looking at isn’t just a flat painting. Says Kholkhlov, “”Valeriya used different techniques of face painting so you can see a lot of variations – from sketch and graphic arts to water-colour and oil-paintings. “

Another set, ‘Angry Beards,’ paints imagery from the game Angry Birds onto bearded men.

The power of body paint to completely transform human bodies into everything from exotic animals to crashed cars can be astounding. Some artists use it to make their models virtually disappear. See 31 more works of art on human canvas.