Why Many Tattoo Artists Won't Tattoo Portraits Upside Down

Many tattoo artists will not tattoo portraits upside down because a portrait depends on likeness, and human brains read faces accurately only when they are upright. Perception scientists call this the face inversion effect. An upside-down portrait is harder for the artist to build, harder for others to recognize, and appears inverted to everyone else for most of the day.

An upside-down tattoo, sometimes called a wearer-facing tattoo, is oriented so the person wearing it sees it right side up when they look down at it. Everyone else sees it upside down. These requests come up most often on the forearm and thigh, and they come up often with portrait tattoos and pet portrait tattoos, where clients understandably want to look down and see a loved one.

Durham portrait tattoo artist Brian Parrillo is one of the artists who declines these requests, with very rare exceptions. This post explains why, drawing on Brian's training as a portrait painter and on decades of research into how people see faces.

Why likeness depends on seeing a face upright

A portrait tattoo succeeds or fails on likeness. Likeness lives in small details: the distance between the eyes, the angle of a jaw, the curve at the corner of a mouth, the way light falls across a brow and leaves the eye sockets in shadow. Shift any one of them slightly and the face becomes a stranger.

Some realism tattoo artists transfer a highly detailed, traced stencil to the skin and follow it exactly. Brian Parrillo works differently. He studied classical drawing, oil painting, and portraiture in art school, and his fine art portfolio of charcoal drawings and oil paintings hangs at Ethereal Tattoo Gallery in Durham. Brian applies a simple stencil and does not rely on it to carry the likeness. He builds the portrait by hand, studying your reference photo as he works and judging every shadow against it.

That process depends on Brian seeing the face the right way up, the same way he sees the photo and the same way he painted faces for years. Turned upside down, the face loses the visual cues he uses to check his own accuracy. Brian cannot deliver his best work upside down, and he will not offer a client less than his best on something as personal as a portrait.

The science: your brain reads faces upright

Psychologists have studied upside-down faces since the 1960s, and the finding is consistent: people are much worse at recognizing a face when it is inverted, and the drop is larger for faces than for most other objects. This is the face inversion effect. Researchers believe inversion disrupts our ability to process the spatial relationships among facial features, which is exactly what a likeness is made of.

The most striking demonstration is the Thatcher effect, first described in 1980 by Peter Thompson, a psychologist at the University of York. Thompson flipped the eyes and mouth inside a photo of a face. Upright, the result looks grotesque. Turned upside down, most viewers do not notice anything wrong. You can try a version of it yourself with this Naked Scientists demonstration.

For a portrait tattoo, the lesson cuts two ways:

• For the artist: distortions that would be obvious in an upright face can slip past unnoticed in an inverted one. That is a serious problem when the goal is a true likeness of one specific person or animal.

• For everyone who sees the tattoo: an upside-down face is harder to recognize and harder to read for expression. The likeness Brian works so hard to capture is partly lost on every viewer except the wearer.

Does this apply to pet portrait tattoos?

Yes. A dog or cat portrait is still a face, and Brian Parrillo approaches a pet portrait tattoo with the same standard of likeness as a human portrait. The owner knows exactly how their dog tilts an ear or how their cat's markings break around the eye, and those details are what make the tattoo theirs.

There is also research suggesting that expertise matters here. In a well-known 1986 study, psychologists Rhea Diamond and Susan Carey found that dog experts, people knowledgeable enough to tell apart individual dogs of the same breed, had their memory for dog photos disrupted by inversion about as much as face recognition is (Diamond and Carey, 1986). People without that expertise showed a much smaller effect.

To be fair to the evidence, later studies have produced mixed results on how far this expertise effect extends (Rossion and Curran, 2010). The safest takeaway is a modest one: the more closely you know an individual animal's face, the more its likeness depends on fine details. Those are the details an upside-down orientation makes harder to build and harder to see.

Living with an upside-down portrait

Think about how often you actually hold your arm up to look at your forearm. For most of the day, your arms hang at your sides and your legs are under you. In those positions, a wearer-facing portrait on the forearm or thigh is upside down. One UK studio, Set Sail Tattoo Studio, puts it at roughly 90 percent of the time for an arm.

That matters more for a portrait than for almost any other design. A flower or a symbol still reads when inverted. A face does not read the same way, for the reasons above. The person you chose to honor becomes harder for friends and strangers to recognize.

Orientation also shapes your future tattoos. Many artists design pieces to flow with the body and face outward, a long tradition in tattooing. An upside-down portrait can make it awkward to add work nearby or to build toward a sleeve. Brian has seen people later want an upside-down tattoo covered or reworked, which is part of why he takes this position.

"But the tattoo is for me"

The wish to look down and see someone you love is real, and it deserves respect! Many portrait tattoos are memorials, for a parent, a grandparent, or a dog who was there for every hard year. Wanting that face turned toward you makes complete sense.

It helps to remember that every tattoo is for its wearer, no matter what. That includes every correctly oriented portrait you have ever admired on someone else.

Brian Parrillo's goal is a portrait you are proud to show anyone, that reads as a true likeness from across a room, and that still looks right in ten years.

The exception: when inversion is the art

The same science that makes upside-down portraits a problem can become a creative tool. An inverted or partly inverted face unsettles the viewer because the brain struggles to read it, which is exactly the feeling some designs want to create.

Artists have played with this for centuries. Japanese illustrator Utagawa Yoshitora's "upside-down pictures" from around 1861, and British artist Rex Whistler's "Reversible Faces" from the early 1930s, were drawn to read as a different face in each direction (Golan Levin, Ambigrammatic Figures).

For Brian Parrillo, that means a small number of exceptions, but it really depends on the project.

About Brian Parrillo

Brian Parrillo is a black and grey realism tattoo artist in Durham, North Carolina, specializing in portrait tattoos, pet portrait tattoos, and microrealism. He founded Ethereal Tattoo Gallery in 2018 and has been tattooing for more than a decade.

• Training: art school focused on classical drawing, oil painting, and portraiture

• Fine art: charcoal, pastel, and oil portraits, several on display at Ethereal (see the portfolio)

• Specialties: memorial and family portraits, celebrity portraits, lady face tattoos, and dog and pet portraits

• Notable work: tattoos on two-time FIFA World Cup champion Megan Rapinoe that appeared on a 2023 Time cover, plus work for NBA All-Star Brandon Ingram and professional soccer players Merritt Mathias and Diana Ordóñez (see more)

Frequently asked questions

What is an upside-down tattoo?

An upside-down tattoo, also called a wearer-facing tattoo, is oriented so the wearer sees it right side up when looking down at it. Everyone else sees it inverted. Forearms, wrists, and thighs are the most common placements.

Why won't tattoo artists tattoo portraits upside down?

Many portrait tattoo artists decline because likeness depends on seeing a face upright. Research on the face inversion effect shows people recognize inverted faces far less accurately, and the Thatcher effect shows that distortions in an upside-down face often go unnoticed. That makes an inverted portrait harder to build well and harder for others to recognize.

Will Brian Parrillo tattoo a portrait facing me?

Not for a realistic likeness of a person or pet. The rare exceptions are surreal, spooky, or illusion designs where inversion is part of the art. Brian Parrillo builds each portrait by hand from your reference photo, and he needs to see the face the right way up to create a likeness to his standard. You can read more on his booking page.

Does this apply to pet portrait tattoos?

Yes. Dog, cat, and other animal portraits depend on fine details of the individual face, just as human portraits do. Brian applies the same standard to every pet portrait tattoo.

Do artists ever draw upside down on purpose?

Yes, as a training exercise. Art teacher Betty Edwards popularized copying an image upside down, most famously Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky, so students stop drawing what they think a face looks like and copy only lines and shapes (The Art of Education). That exercise works precisely because inversion switches off our face reading. It is useful for practicing contours. It is not how anyone judges whether a finished portrait looks like a specific person.

Which placements are most affected?

The forearm and the front of the thigh, because those are the spots people most often look down at. In both, a wearer-facing portrait appears upside down to others whenever the arm or leg is at rest.

How do I book a portrait tattoo with Brian Parrillo?

Fill out the booking form with your reference photos and placement ideas. Brian reviews every request before discussing appointments, and pricing is quoted by the piece.

Start your portrait tattoo

If you are planning a portrait tattoo of a person or a pet, Brian Parrillo would love to hear about it. Share your best reference photos and your placement ideas through his booking form, and visit Ethereal Tattoo Gallery at 730 Rigsbee Avenue in Durham, NC to see his fine art in person.