Wouldn't work.
1. The Appearance screen is where tattoos and piercings get to shine. If you can't describe them as any more than 'It's American Traditional', it's going to look really lame.
2. The more ambiguous the description, the more repetitive it looks when you do it on multiple body parts. Just doing skulls and dragons differently for like, eight body parts nearly killed me.
3. American traditional doesn't even really make sense in a space setting. I mean, what is it? Deep south confederate flags? Native American? Cowboy? I got no fucking clue.
4. The parser calls need something a bit more comprehensive to pump out when you reference them. E.g. 'Skull-marked hand, Dragon-patterned breasts, tattooed belly, inked back etc. 'American traditional breasts' not only sounds weird, it also doesn't leave room for a ton of alternate adjectives.
5. The idea of people stabbing you with needles for hours on end is so mind-blowingly primitive that a society with gene-modding tech would have done away with it ages ago. I mean, come on. There's likely purists who like to do it the old fashioned way, but you'd have to be pretty hardcore about it to sit for an hour with sterilized equipment just to get a bleeding tattoo that will eventually fade, as opposed to a quick poke with a gene-mod that gives you a scented, unfading, painless, permanent tattoo that can optionally glow. Maybe folks like the space Yakuza still do things with ink and bamboo stick poking, but mainstream folks wouldn't.
6. There's nothing saying people can't submit tattoo designs later on to get what they want. That's what the template is for, after all.