Mickey Schlick of Montana Tattoo Company. Learn how timeless tattoos evolve, the science behind ink longevity, and the art of designing for a lifetime in Missoula.">

The Impermanent Permanent: A Tattoo Artist's Honest Take on Forever

My name is Mickey Schlick. I’ve been tattooing for over two decades, and for the last several years, I’ve had the honor of building and running Montana Tattoo Company here in Missoula. In that time, I’ve placed thousands of tattoos on thousands of people. I’ve also watched my own older work live and change on the skin of friends and long time clients. So let’s talk about the single biggest misconception in our craft, the one that sits at the heart of every consultation, the one we need to address with radical honesty.

The idea that a tattoo is permanent.

It’s not. Not in the way most people think. What we create is not a frozen image, a sticker slapped on that will look identical in forty years. It’s a living collaboration between ink, skin, and time. The permanence is in the commitment, in the story, in the mark itself. But the physical manifestation? That’s a dynamic, evolving piece of biological art. Understanding this isn’t a compromise, it’s the key to getting a truly great, meaningful tattoo that you’ll love for a lifetime, not just for a week on Instagram.

Here in Montana, we understand impermanence intimately. The Clark Fork River outside our studio door is never the same river twice. The Larch needles turn gold and fall. The mountain peaks wear down over millennia. Our lives are a series of changes, and our bodies are the landscape where those changes are recorded. A tattoo is part of that record. It’s not an interruption of your skin’s story, it’s a new chapter written into it. And like any good story, it develops, matures, and gains character with age.

This is the conversation we need to have. Not as a disclaimer, but as an invitation to a deeper, more thoughtful approach to body art. Let’s pull back the curtain on what really happens, why it happens, and how we, as artists and clients, can work with time instead of fighting a losing battle against it.

The Science of the Shift: Why Your Tattoo Doesn't Stay Put

First, we have to ditch the idea of skin as static canvas. It’s more like a lively, slightly damp sponge that’s constantly rebuilding itself. When we tattoo, we’re depositing millions of microscopic pigment particles into the dermis, the layer of skin below the surface. Your body immediately identifies these particles as foreign. It’s a friendly invasion, but an invasion nonetheless.

Your immune system sends cells to encapsulate the ink, trying to contain it. This is what initially “holds” the tattoo. But this process never really stops. Over years and decades, these cells break down, get replaced, and the ink particles slowly, slowly migrate and break apart. It’s a glacial process, but it’s relentless. Combine this with the natural aging of your skin, and you get the three classic signs of an aging tattoo.

Fading: The Slow Fade of Memory

The vibrancy diminishes. Those brilliant blues, fiery reds, and sunny yellows lose their punch. This is especially true for lighter colors. White, yellow, pastel pink, they often fade toward a soft, creamy highlight or disappear entirely. Why? The pigment particles are literally being broken down and carried away by your body’s lymphatic system. Sun exposure is the great accelerator here. UV radiation bombards and shatters pigment molecules. Think of it like a vibrant mural painted on a barn in direct Montana sunlight. Without protection, it will weather and pale.

Blurring: When Sharp Lines Become Soft Edges

This is the one that surprises people most. Those crisp, clean lines in a fresh tattoo don’t stay razor sharp. They soften. They blur. It’s not a mistake, it’s physiology. As we age, our skin produces less collagen and elastin. These are the proteins that give skin its snap and tightness. As they diminish, the skin’s structure becomes less firm. The walls of the little pockets holding the ink start to sag, just a tiny bit. The ink particles have a little more room to shift. The result is that a line that was once a precise, single stroke becomes a softer, slightly wider band. It’s like drawing with a fine-tip pen on paper, then spritzing it with a bit of water. The intent of the line remains, but its edges become part of the atmosphere.

Spreading: The Gentle Migration

Closely related to blurring is spreading, or ink migration. This is where those pigment particles decide to take a very, very slow walk from their original deposition site. It’s more noticeable in areas with thin, mobile skin. The skin on your fingers, wrists, and ankles is thin and stretches a lot with daily movement. Ink here will spread more noticeably over time. The skin on your back, calves, or thighs is thicker and more stable, so ink tends to stay put better. It’s the difference between building on bedrock versus building on river silt.

These changes aren’t flaws. They are the inevitable, natural biography of your tattoo written by your own body. The question isn’t how to stop it, you can’t. The question is, how do we design and plan for it intelligently, so the tattoo ages with grace, dignity, and preserved meaning?

Designing for Decades: The Artist's Playbook for Longevity

This is where the artist’s expertise transitions from pure artistry to a hybrid of biology, forecasting, and design strategy. At Montana Tattoo Company, this long term thinking is baked into our consultation process. We’re not just designing for how it looks when you walk out the door, we’re designing for how it will look when you’re picking up your grandkids, or reminiscing about that hike in the Bitterroots decades later.

Here are the core principles we use to build tattoos that stand the test of time.

Bold Will Hold (It's a Cliché Because It's True)

Fine-line, single-needle, micro-realism tattoos are incredibly popular. And when they’re fresh, they can be stunning. But I need to be brutally honest, they are the most vulnerable to the effects of time. Those hair thin lines are the first to blur and soften. Tiny details, especially in portraits, can melt together. What was a detailed eye can become a soft smudge.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have detail. It means we build it with a foundation of boldness. Strong, confident outlines create a structural skeleton that will remain readable for life. We use contrast strategically, black next to skin, to create shapes that hold. Think of it like the difference between a pencil sketch and a woodcut print. The woodcut has weight, presence, and clarity that endures. We design with sufficient "visual weight" so that even as the edges soften, the soul of the image remains intact.

The Strategic Color Palette

Not all colors are created equal, especially under the sun of a Montana summer. Black is the most stable pigment we have. A well-saturated black and gray tattoo has legendary longevity. When we use color, we think in terms of how a palette will age together. We might steer clients away from designs that rely solely on the most fugitive colors, like light yellows and oranges, for their core impact. Instead, we might use those as accents within a framework of more stable colors like deep reds, violets, and blacks. It’s like painting a landscape, you need the dark trees and mountains (your stable colors) to make the sunset sky (your fugitive colors) pop, and the composition holds even if the sky mellows.

Anatomical Intelligence: Picking the Right Real Estate

Where you place a tattoo is a huge factor in its aging process. During a consultation, we talk about this openly.

• The Premium Lots (Aging Gracefully): The outer shoulders, calves, back, thighs. These areas have thicker skin, less drastic stretching, and generally see less direct, daily sun friction (compared to forearms). They are the bedrock. Tattoos here change the slowest.
• The Dynamic Zones (Expect More Change): The inner biceps, sides of the torso, anywhere the skin stretches and contracts regularly. These areas will see more spreading and blurring over time. We design accordingly, often with more forgiving, organic shapes.
• The High-Traffic Areas (Embrace the Patina): Hands, fingers, feet, necks. The skin is thin, it’s exposed constantly, and it regenerates faster. Ink here will spread, fade, and require more frequent touch-ups. Getting tattooed here is a commitment to a more active, collaborative relationship with your artist over the years. The tattoos often develop a beautiful, weathered, "stamped" quality that I personally love.

Designing with Redundancy and Symbolic Strength

This is a more subtle, philosophical approach. We design so that the meaning of the piece isn’t held hostage by one tiny, perfect detail. If you want a tattoo for your daughter named Lily, we don’t just do a photorealistic lily that might lose its definition. We might incorporate her name, or her birth flower, or design the lily in a bold, graphic style that reads as "lily" even from across a room in twenty years. The symbol remains strong. This is wisdom borrowed from centuries-old tattooing traditions, like Japanese Irezumi, where the core motifs, a koi fish, a dragon, a peony, are so fundamentally strong in their design that they are unmistakable for generations.

The Psychological Journey: From Static Image to Living Story

This is the most important part for the person wearing the tattoo. The mental shift. If you get a tattoo expecting it to be a perfect, frozen snapshot, you are setting yourself up for a strange kind of grief as it changes. But if you approach it as the beginning of a story that you and your skin will write together, every change becomes part of the narrative.

I see this shift happen with collectors over time. They start to appreciate the "healed and settled" look of a tattoo more than the fresh, shiny version. They point to a slightly blurred line and say, "That’s from the summer I worked construction on that ranch." The faded blue in a river tattoo reminds them of all the real rivers they’ve swam in since. The tattoo becomes a map of lived experience, not just an image.

This is what I call developing "temporal literacy." It’s the ability to read your own skin as a historical document. The tattoo isn’t corrupted by time, it’s authenticated by it. That’s a powerful, beautiful way to live in your own body. It embraces the Montana ethos, nothing here is static. The landscape changes with the seasons, the fire, the snow. Our marks upon it should be made with the same understanding.

The Ethical Imperative: Our Responsibility in the Consultation Room

This brings me to the core of what we do at Montana Tattoo Company. The ethical burden is on us, the artists. It is our absolute duty to manage expectations with transparent, sometimes uncomfortable, honesty.

This starts with our portfolios. Anyone can make a tattoo look amazing fresh, under perfect lighting, on swollen skin. The real test is how it looks healed. You’ll see that our artists, like James Strickland with his bold traditional work, Nicole Miller with her intricate symbolic pieces, and Noelin Wheeler with his illustrative flair, all show healed photos. We’re proud of how our work lives. We want you to see the full lifecycle.

An ethical consultation for a custom tattoo must cover:

• The Timeline Forecast: "This fine detail here, that will likely soften within a few years. These color highlights may fade noticeably. The bold outline is what will carry this piece for life."
• Lifestyle Talk: "You’re a river guide? That’s amazing. This tattoo on your forearm will see a lot of sun. Let’s talk about sunscreen as a non-negotiable part of aftercare, for life."
• Placement Realities: "You want this on your rib cage? It’s a beautiful spot. I need to tell you that because the skin stretches so much with breathing and movement, the lines will soften and spread faster here than on your calf. Is that okay with you?"
• The Touch-Up Conversation: "This is a lifetime piece. It’s common and completely normal to need a touch up every 5-10 years to re-saturate colors and sharpen lines. Think of it like maintaining a beautiful piece of wood furniture."

An artist who sells you a tattoo as a perfect, unchanging commodity is doing you a disservice. They are selling a fantasy. We are here to collaborate on a reality, one that is rich, meaningful, and designed to evolve beautifully with you.

The Philosophical Heart: From Permanence to Process

So, where does this leave us with the idea of a "timeless" tattoo? I believe timelessness doesn’t live in the unchanging pigment. It lives in the enduring resonance of the symbol. It lives in the story that remains vivid even as the colors mute.

The memorial tattoo for a loved one will fade. But your memory of them does not. The tattoo marking your survival, your journey, your commitment, will blur at the edges. But the strength you gained from that experience only solidifies. The tattoo becomes a touchstone, a personal monument whose physical weathering only adds to its emotional truth.

This is the shift, from permanence to process. We are not creating artifacts to be placed under glass. We are planting seeds that will grow and change with the person. My role as an artist isn’t just to execute a design. It’s to be a guide in that process, to use my knowledge of materials, skin, and time to help you plant the right seed in the right place, so the tree that grows is strong and beautiful for all the seasons of your life.

That’s the collaboration. That’s the craft. It’s what gets me up and excited to come into the studio in Missoula every day. It’s not about fighting biology, but about forming a profound partnership with it. Your body will change. Your life will change. Let’s make a mark that’s wise enough, and bold enough, to change right along with you, and remain a true and honest part of your story until the very last page.

This post topic was inspired by Noelin Wheeler. At Montana Tattoo Company we host independent tattoo artists who run their own businesses and create work with intention. Call 406-626-8688 or visit any of our artist pages to start the consultation process. Every project starts with a conversation and a vision. Choose the artist whose style fits your idea and reach out directly. Connect with Mickey Schlick, James Strickland, Noelin Wheeler, Nicole Miller, and boldbooking.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">BoldBooking. Book a consultation, explore portfolios, and bring your idea to life. I have completely automated the studio side. Aftercare, directions, booking links 24 hours a day with completely consistent customer service. At any interaction you are welcome to ask to talk to Mickey directly and you will either be connected to me or I will get back to you asap.