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I'm planning on doing some bright tattoos (thunderbolts in green or white) for my unhelmeted Rainbow Warriors, and I'm wondering if anyone has any advice for making them look like tattoos rather than just paint on skin?

Never tried it myself but the Forces of Warmachine: Mercenaries book (from Mk2 (their second edition)) has a simple but really effective looking tutorial in it that basically says:
Put your base skin colour down
Apply your tattoo over that
Shade your skin with VERY translucent layers, get plenty of mixing medium into the paint
Then when you've finished the skin touch up your tattoos just a bit and you should have a tattoo that looks a little faded and dulled down, like it's actually a tattoo rather than body paint.

Adding a drop of skin tone to the tattoo color has been my secret sauce. Very subtle but effective.