Question on making tattoos

I've been making tattoos for a while now for personal use not commercial or anything.
But i would like to know how to make the tattoo look realistic. (no white outline around the tattoos and looks like it has been freshly inked)

You'll probably have better luck with this question in the texturing forum. Here are a couple of threads to start with:

/109/2b/76703/1.html

/109/32/80851/1.html

the white outline is the alpha halo.
play with your alpha channel to get rid of it.
test your tattoos on the beta grid to save image upload costs.

I've had luck using PNG format with transparency & no halo. Might try that & see how it works.

The white halo is caused by the texture application filling any blank (transparent) areas of your image with white when you save it. The alpha channel then shows a little bit of this, in your texture, around its edges because of anti-aliasing.
I use the tga format for all my images that use transparency. I don't know which texture application you use but a good way to avoid that halo around your tattoos is to make a new layer under your main tattoo layer. Then fill the new layer with the same (or as close as you can make it) color your tattoo uses. Saving then as a tga, for me, prevents the white halo.
If you are making tattoos with multiple colors, a filter plugin by Flaming Pear Studios called Solidify does a good job of filling your finished tattoo layer's remaining blank areas with sampled colors from the tattoo's edges. Use this after creating your alpha channel. Then save your tga.

The filter plugin can be found here:
http://www.flamingpear.com/download.html

-Iva

Robin Wood says it better than me here:
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/WhiteHalo2.html

-Iva

I have found that once you get all the flash lined out where you want it, go over the whole thing with an eraser set at about 8 to 10%. Just want a tiny bit of transparency. This helps the patterens to blend with the AV's skin and look more like a tattoo and less like it was painted on.

I'll post the quick and dirty method...
The trick is to tint the tattoo the same color as your skin (when you put it on the clothing layer in SL). That makes the white errata in the alpha blend away and gives a better, more accurate edge reproduction than the filter does (because you're not changing anything). To avoid fading the tattoo when you do, just increase the contrast and brightness on it a little before you upload. The older ink look is done by NOT adding brightness or contrast (depending on how rich the colors are). You can also skew the color range on the tattoo to balance out the skin color tint if it requires it. Over 100 tattoos now and I've only seen one (1) that needed color skewing. The end result is quite impessive..



The only downside to this method is the tattoo tint might need to be darkened or lightened depend on the skin color of the individual wearing it. If you're not selling them then you won't have to worry about it.