How to add a back tattoo?

dmetreeus

Only way I know to add a tattoo is the layered image editor or edit the image directly. But skin wraps around and the back especially gets split in two. I looked at some videos none did a big centered back tattoo.  Is there a trick to this?

Richard Haseltine

How extensive? One option, for iray, would be an iray Decal node (Create menu) projecting the image onto the back, but if it needs to spread far enough to wrap then that would preduce shearing once the surface started to curve away.

Another option, using external applications, would be to create a new UV set that doesn't have seams in the back, and is as flat as possible in the areas of relevance while being allowed to be a mess anywhere else, then texture on that and bake the result to the standard UVs - with a tattoo texture and mask you could then use the Layered Image Editor to apply them to your actual skin texture.

PixelSploiting

Painting with projected stencil either in Blender or other 3d painter of your choice.