The Hidden Art of ‘Tattooing’ Fursuits

Tattoo artists and fursuit designers may have more in common than you thought. In fact, sometimes the two worlds collide to make giant, tattooed furries. 

The furry lifestyle is being featured more and more often in mainstream media, and as the internet seeps further into our everyday lives, it’s becoming more common to see fursuits in your daily browsing activity. Even #fursuitfriday is a thing on Twitter, and a quick Google search will result in many a furry forum. An interesting question is being asked by many furries on these forums across the world—how do you tattoo a fursuit?

To non-furries, this isn’t even a question that would come up in your brain—why would you need to tattoo an animal costume? But furries argue that each fursona has a different personality, and sometimes those personalities and characters decide that they want tattoos. This means that many people in the furry community are faced with the question of how to tattoo a fursuit.

Fursonas are the personalities people take on to express themselves as a furry, and fursuits are the pieces people make or buy in order to represent their fursona visually. The furry genre first began in the 1980s, and once the internet took off so did the furry lifestyle. Now there are furry conventions and even furry web-magazines, along with endless furry forums asking about fursuits. Fursuits are almost always made custom to order and there are only a few distributors out there to make them, so most of the fursuit customization has to be done by hand, especially to make changes after the fursuit has been delivered. Since the fursuit and fursona are so deeply intertwined, fursuits are normally altered semi-regularly and are a pain in the ass to take care of.

People are constantly looking for different ways to customize and “tattoo” their fursuits. And the question on every furry forum seems to be “How can I tattoo my fursuit?”

For many furries, the only way to add “tattoos” to their fursuits is through shaving, dying or sewing patterns into the suit. The process takes a lot of research and patience, but for the furry community, it’s a small price to pay in order to feel completely authentic about their fursonas. 

It seems—after scouring through many a furry forum—that sewing “tattoos” seems to be the best method to permanently mark your fursuit. But, if you’re a tattoo artist looking for a career in the furry world (and you can figure out how to tattoo fur), tattooing fursuits might become your next calling.