Tattoo Madness Tournament – Japanese Style Round 1

This is our favorite month of the year for one simple reason: March Madness, well, and booze-soaked St. Patrick’s Day. While we love filling out brackets for the NCAA Tournament and throwing our paychecks into more pools than there are in the state of Florida we still crave more competition; specifically we want a bracket tournament that is more our style. With this in mind, we created the 2014 Inked Tattoo Madness Tournament.

We took 64 tattoo artists and threw them into a bracket divided by four different styles of tattooing: Japanese Style, Black & Grey, Realism and The Field. The Field consists of a grab bag of tattoo styles including Traditional, New School, Watercolor and many more. There is no seeding in the tournament as we entered the names in at random. When picking a tattoo to enter in the tournament we went through each artist’s online portfolio and picked the first tattoo that made us drop our jaws in awe.

Throughout the month of March we will put up posts with a series of matchups pitting two artists against each other so you can vote for a favorite. The winner moves on to the next round in the bracket while the loser goes home. On April 7 we will announce the winner of the 2014 Inked Tattoo Madness Tournament as chosen by your votes.

So without further ado allow us to kick things off with Round 1 of the Japanese Style region.

Click gallery below to blow-up the bracket.

Tattoo by Horitomo

Tattoo by Mimp

Tattoo by Jess Yen

Tattoo by Horimasa

Tattoo by Koji Ichimaru

Tattoo by Matt Shamah

Tattoo by Kazuhisa Matsumoto

Tattoo by Horitoshi 1

Tattoo by Aaron Bell

Tattoo by Brian Kaneko

Tattoo by Henning Jorgensen

Tattoo by Matt Deverson

Tattoo by Colin Baker

Tattoo by Chris Crooks

Tattoo by Luke Stewart

Tattoo by Hori Shin