InkOnMe

The problem

A tattoo consultation can take forty minutes and still end with “I’ll have a think”. The artist has drawn the design and held the stencil against the client’s arm, but most people can’t picture how a large piece will actually sit on their body. The thread goes quiet, and a booking that should have happened doesn’t.

What it does

The artist takes a photo of the client’s skin, picks one of their own designs, and says where it goes and how big. About forty seconds later there’s a realistic preview of that tattoo on that client. If it isn’t right, they adjust it and go again. When they’re happy, they turn the screen round, or send the client a private link.

Two rules shape everything:

1. Only the artist presses go. There’s no public button. A rough render never lands in a client’s messages, because nothing reaches a client until the artist has seen it.
2. It shows the artist’s work. It doesn’t draw. No generated flash, no “describe your dream tattoo”. Every line in every preview came from a design the artist made.

Around the preview sits the rest of what a studio needs day to day: a public profile with portfolio, healed work and bookable flash, a page for each artist, and an enquiry form that puts photos and briefs in one inbox instead of four people’s DMs.

How it’s built

Previews run as background jobs. Each studio’s quota is checked and charged in one step, so a render can never be billed twice or run past the limit halfway through a consultation. Watermarks go on before an image is stored, so there’s never a clean copy lying around. Client photos have retention periods, deletion really removes the files, and previews are purged after twelve months.

Where it’s at

InkOnMe started life as a consumer app for seeing a tattoo on yourself. In August 2026 we rebuilt it for studios instead, for reasons we explain in why InkOnMe will never draw a tattoo. We’re now looking for three UK studios to pilot it free for eight weeks. If you run one, get in touch.