I’m with OP, those Sleeping Dogs tattoos are incredible. I was a mixed Asian/Latino teenager in that era of like quasi-pan-asian neotrad tattoos so all the cool older kids of my youth had those & it really made an impression on me & it was just really nostalgic to see when I played Sleeping Dogs for the first time after its definitive release came out.
These pictures don’t even do them justice. The attention to detail in the gradient & the fading, you can see which tattoos are aged & which ones have healed & been added recently. Fresher tattoos are blasted over more faded ones. All the tattoos are able to obscure so well into each other on any individual character. I think oftentimes in video games & animation, character designers try to use tattoos as singular prominent statement pieces but in many cultures & subcultures, that’s just not how people get tattooed.
Meanwhile we have Wei. Most of his tattoos are not visible in his default outfit. All of them could be ignored entirely depending on how you style him. Yet, he has the head of the larger dragon & wing of a larger eagle on his chest which are the only tattoos you can really see in his standard outfit right above the neckline of his tank top. This is super intentional. I think tattoos as narrative symbolism is kinda played out, but I enjoy how they angle in on his eagle when he’s doing american cop idealized justice hoorah shit & on the dragon when he’s going back to his childhood neighborhood roots & getting nostalgic with his triad homies. When he is conflicted, dun dun duuunnnn, he’s of course got a nice center close up where you can see both.
Kinda wanna play this game again just talking about how much I love the tattoos in it.
My general grievance with tattoos in video games, as someone who is not an artist but worked in an American traditional tattoo shop for a little bit & has that mostly that style on my body, I’m so annoyed how they just look like stickers on people in most games. The colors are always too bright, the lines are never thick enough, & the designs are just a little too much like those fake gangster looney toons memes your cousin or uncle share on Facebook.
