Trash Polka Tattoos | The Duo Who Created The Naturalistic And Chaotic Bold Tattoo Motifs

‘Trash’ is everything beyond the realistic: destruction, abstraction. The trash polka tattoos style was created by Simone Plaff and Volko Merschky. 

The idea is lifting tattoos to new heights. It’s so different, it’s so clean and classy and abstract. All the things that make tattooing so loose and tight completely fall away to reveal something unique and wonderful.

People tend to think that the body has restrictions on certain points. The whole point of trash polka is to look at the whole body as a canvas and stretch these limits. 

In that sense, the design can flow from one part of the body to the other.

Some describe it as a mixture between chaos and nature. This is because it embraces a bold style as well as a sense of realism.

Trash Polka was invented by two artists in Germany, Simone Plaff and Volko Merschky. They were both artists and musicians. In 1998 they decided to open their own tattoo club in Bueno Vista to completely change the way we understand art. Merschky and Pfaff have made art together for more than 26 years.

In addition to tattooing, they paint, take photographs, and play what they’ve dubbed “morbid folk music” in their band, Dobbs Dead. They use their own photography and painting in their custom tattoo designs; in turn, tattoo clients appear in the photography projects.  

When designing a tattoo, the couple creates a story around each customer’s stated theme. 

They begin with a photograph of the client’s nude body, and then in Adobe Photoshop CC, they’ll create a design using the image of the body as a guide. 

Merschky says good design is like a good song—when it succeeds, it’s because everything works together. 

By rejecting all forms of traditional tattooing styles, the duo decided to use the entire body as a canvas in order to produce their own unique design in order to represent their music. From this concept, the idea of trash polka was born.

How Are The Trash Polka Tattoo Designs Created?

The style is a way of meshing realism with ‘trash’. The word polka stems from a traditional folk dance genre found in many European and American countries and is performed by many folk artists

The art that has been coming out of these two people have remarkable elements of line, structure, depth, boldness and even at times pure softness. 

It can be a collection of designs that fall into a collage which oftentimes don’t make sense together. On the other hand, they could link together or complement one another.

However, there is a structure to it. Most trash polka tattoos have natural elements combined with scenes of chaotic elements. This is what makes the design so unique, rare and hard to achieve by many tattoo artists.

The end design pushes out a certain kind of energy. Open skin can form part of the negative space within the tattoo, just as much as solid black. 

It can be very mechanical with heavy bold strong lines but to make a trash polka tattoo successful it needs to have those soft elements added in.

It Is All About Telling A Story

For trash polka tattoos to be done right, it should definitely tell a story. With Trash polka tattoos you often see a lot of lettering that is very graphic and that is also very heavy.

In terms of colour, the idea is to have one single minimalist colour combined with black or grey. The single colour is most often red or blue. Another distinctive characteristic of Trash Polka tattoos is their smudges which adds to the chaotic feel of the overall aesthetic.

There are many people out there who love blending chaos and beauty in their tattoo designs, which is yet another reason why the Trash Polka tattoo fad has blown up as much as it has.

As far as Trash Polka tattoo designs go, you really can go in any direction that you want to. 

You can merge the beauty with the chaos, or you can just use the style with a specific image that you’ve always wanted on your body. 

The key is to think of something that will look great in black and red for years to come. The only designs we would not recommend in the trash polka style are those that generally look better when they are very colourful.