Create your new tattoo right now
Upload your photo and get 4 looks on you, not on a model.
Upload tips
- · Photograph the exact body part you want tattooed
- · Even daylight, skin fully in frame
- · Hold the limb the way it will usually be seen
The only decision on this site that is permanent
Everything else here washes off, grows out or gets returned. A tattoo does not. Removal is slower, more painful and more expensive than the tattoo was, and it rarely finishes the job. That imbalance is the entire reason this page exists: describe the idea, see it on your own skin, and find out in half a minute whether you actually want it there.
What you can describe
The idea, in your own words
Say what you want tattooed and where. The description is doing the work here, so specifics help: the subject, the placement, roughly how it should sit on the body.
Style and size
Fine line, minimal, blackwork, traditional, neo-traditional, realism, Japanese, geometric, ornamental, dotwork, watercolour and lettering, from tiny through to a full piece.
Style changes the idea
The same subject in fine line and in blackwork are not two versions of one tattoo. Trying both is usually more useful than refining one.
Size and placement together
Fine detail shrinks badly on small pieces and blurs over years. Seeing your idea at the size you had in mind, in the place you had in mind, is the most honest test of it.
This is an illustration, not a stencil
What you get is a picture of an idea on your body — useful for deciding and for showing an artist what you are after. It is not a design, and a tattooist will not and should not work from it directly. How a line holds on your skin, how the piece ages, how it wraps a limb and what it takes to cover something already there are judgements only a person with a machine in their hand can make. Take the preview to a consultation and let them draw the real thing.
Placement is a decision about the rest of your life
Where a tattoo goes settles who sees it and when. Hands, neck and face are visible in every job interview and every family photograph, and some workplaces still have views about them. Ribs, feet and the inside of an arm hurt more and heal slower. Areas that stretch or crease — the stomach, the inner elbow, the knee — move the design over years in ways a drawing cannot show. Seeing your idea in two or three placements is usually more useful than perfecting it in one.
Give the description more than a noun
“A snake” produces something generic. “A fine line snake coiling around the left forearm, head towards the wrist, no shading” produces something you can react to. The more the description says about subject, direction, size and where on the body it sits, the closer the preview lands to what is in your head — and the more useful it is to show an artist.