Tribal Sleeve
This is the Ed Hardy of tattoos. You’ll often see them on big, beefy men in tank tops with chains around their neck. They’ll swagger around with barely pent up aggression, and gloriously sport a spiky mess of bold black lines across their shoulders and upper arms. 
No-one really knows where they come from, and they certainly don’t mean anything. Getting a Tribal tattoo is essentially a tragic confession that you saw that all your friends had cool tattoos and you just decided to jump on the bandwagon and mark your body indelibly with what is, essentially, a meaningless doodle. Avoid at all costs, unless you want your inability to think for yourself branded for all to see.
Kanji
Otherwise known as Japanese calligraphy, they are often rightly derided as not actually meaning what the wearer thinks they do, but this is not their greatest offence. The worst thing about kanji is that, by getting one, you’re essentially begging every person who ever notices it on your body to ask you what it means, and you’ll be describing your faux eastern spirituality to everyone you ever meet for the rest of your life.
That is, until you actually bump into someone from Japan and they laughingly reveal to you that your beautiful calligraphy doesn’t mean Truth, but actually ‘Horse.’ A true, and rather embarrassing story it must be said.
Pretty Things
Stars, hearts, butterflies, flowers; honestly, I don’t even think this one needs explaining. All of these motifs are so commonly found that it’s incomprehensible to me that, in an attempt to assert your individuality by getting a defining tattoo, you would instead join the legions of indistinguishable girls (usually) who picked something off the wall in the tattoo-parlour.
Often found on hipbones, ankles, nape of the neck or feet, they will last forever as an emblem of your generic poor choice. You could have had anything, something new, original and unique, but no, you settled for the normal stars, flowers or whatever.
Wings
What are you really trying to say here? That you’re a fallen angel? You’re flighty? You’re so hopelessly trapped by humanity’s inability to evolve the power of flight, that you have to try and speed the process along by drawing a blueprint of what natural selection failed to provide us with?
Massive back tattoos of wings represent a smorgasbord of flimsy symbolisms, whether it’s an affinity to ‘purity’ or ‘nature’, but all most people read from them is that wings are purely practical appendages. There’s a tragic contradiction in having an object representing movement and upwards trajectory inked statically to your back forever.
this is stupid
you’re stupid