Styles of Henna Designs for Tattoos & Body Art: Tips for Applying Henna Tattoos

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Nakia and I am a part of ancient art henna design studio. I am here to talk to you today about how henna is done and to give you a brief overview of the history of henna and various different component of this fine art form. I’m going to begin today by showing you how a henna design would be created. You can take your time and create your own based upon your own skill level and your own ideas. I’m going to show you some of mine. First you want to take your hand and draw around it, there are also numerous templates that you can find online and print out. To begin to draw a henna design you want to start with the larger elements. A common one used in Indian design is something that kind of looks like a leaf so just take it and draw around. You can fill in the middle much like a leaf looks with a vein in the middle. And then you want to begin working with some fill around it. You never want to start with the fill because you may not be left with enough room for the larger elements. One fill that you can use in our henna design is a hump and it looks basically like a continuous U or a continuous eye that you would have maybe practiced perhaps in grade school. And you can just use that to fill in the whole design, something very simple. Another fill that can be used is an O with a dot in the middle. Again, all of these fill elements are very simple it is in their use if you use a lot of them that they become very beautiful and intricate. So you would just fill in with that until you have your leaf filled the way you want it to be filled. Once the leaf is completely filled in before you begin filling in around it it is traditional to outline it, so just go around it again, trace around it, and then begin to fill. I think this looks a little plain so I would add more elements to it. Maybe some lines to delineate between the different fill areas with a different design which looks like a six or a spiral. And I would just fill in this whole area with that until I was content with the way that it looked. And I could continue doing this all over the whole hand or I could change. You don’t want to fill in the fingers in the same way that you filled in the palm. You want to do a different design but incorporate some of the design from the palm into the fingers. So since we have such a large leaf on the palm, it would be nice to bring some leaves into the fingers but smaller. And usually you don’t put as much fill on the fingers because it would detract attention from the design on the palm. So you could just accent them with some lines and make them look like leaves but not putting too much fill between them. This design would normally go on the palm of the hand as opposed to the back of the hand. The back of the hand is an area where, because of all the ridges and wrinkles you want to make your design extremely bold. If you put a design that is extremely intricate and has a lot of tiny lines on it on the back of your hand it’s not going to show up. The back of the hand also does not tend to take henna as well and that’s something that we’ll discuss a little bit later. "