InkOnMe began as a consumer idea: upload a design, see it on your own body before it’s permanent. We built the app, the API and a waitlist page. Then, in August, we rebuilt it around tattoo studios instead, with two rules that sound like limitations.
- Only the artist can create a preview. Never the client.
- InkOnMe only ever shows the artist’s own designs. It doesn’t draw.
Both rules came from the same realisation. The risky part isn’t the technology. It’s whose name is on the result.
A bad render isn’t the software’s fault
AI previews aren’t reliably good on the first try. A design warps where it wraps round an elbow, or the skin tone is slightly off. If a client makes that themselves, they don’t think “the model had an off day”. They think the artist’s work looks bad.
So a tool that lets clients help themselves would damage the reputation of the very studios paying for it. Putting the artist in between fixes that. They see every render first, redo the ones that aren’t right, and only approved previews can be opened by a client at all.
Letting it draw would lose the people we build for
It would be easy to add a box that says “describe your dream tattoo”. It’s one of the first things people suggest. It’s also the fastest way to make an artist close the tab.
Artists sell their own drawing. A tool that invents designs is a competitor, not an assistant. A tool that takes their design and shows it convincingly on a client’s arm makes them look more capable, which is a very different thing to pay for.
So InkOnMe’s model does placement, wrapping, skin tone, light and angle. Every line in every preview came from a design the artist drew.
The rules solved other problems too
Removing the public button also removed trouble we’d otherwise have had to deal with.
- Nothing to abuse. There’s no anonymous endpoint for someone to hammer until a studio’s monthly renders are gone.
- Predictable costs. Rendering follows how many consultations artists actually have, not how many people saw a post.
- It fits how studios already work. A consultation is a relationship between an artist and a client. Software that gets between them is resented. Software that helps the artist show what they mean gets used.
The trade-off
A consumer app could, in theory, reach millions of people. The studio version reaches a few thousand shops in the UK. But each of those pays a subscription, uses it every week and cares whether it works. A consumer app would need an enormous number of downloads to match that.
We’re now looking for three studios to pilot it free for eight weeks. If that’s you, the InkOnMe page has the details.