🖤 Is AI making your job harder?

Hey, it's Matt.

AI designs are taking over tattoo industry. And the artist community can't agree on what to do about them.

In today's issue:

👀 ICYMI

🗞️ Industry News

Want your work featured next week? Reply to this email with a link to your Instagram post. I might pick yours. 😊

One lucky reader wins a free copy of Fix Your Instagram in 30 Minutes.

All you have to do is vote in the poll at the bottom of this email. Everyone who votes is entered. One winner, picked at random.

The winner gets announced in next week's issue.

Good luck.

A client slides into your DMs. They've got a reference image. Looks clean, detailed, impressive even.

Then you look closer. The lines taper into nothing. The shading is physically impossible. There are six fingers on that hand.

It's AI.

Again.

This is happening to artists every week now. And the community is genuinely divided on what to do about it.

The first group refuses. Full stop. No AI designs, not even as loose inspiration. Their argument: AI scrapes and remixes real artists' work without credit or consent. Tattooing it rewards that. They won't be part of it.

The second group takes the design as a starting point. This is by far the most common stance right now. They use it to understand what the client wants: the mood, the style, the rough composition. Then they draw something real. Something that actually works on skin.

The third group replicates it as-is. Least common. And technically, the most problematic.

AI generates images for screens. Not skin. It has no understanding of how tattoos actually age, move, or heal.

Take line weight. AI loves ultra-thin, hyper-detailed linework packed into tiny spaces. Looks stunning in a mockup.

On skin?

Those lines blur and bleed into each other within a few years. What starts as a crisp geometric pattern becomes an unreadable smudge by year five.

AI also has zero anatomy awareness. It places designs in a vacuum, with no logic for how a piece wraps around a joint, stretches across muscle, or sits on skin that moves.

It doesn't know that the inside of an elbow is a nightmare for detail. It doesn't know that a ribcage breathes.

Then there's shading. AI generates gradients that are technically impossible to recreate with a needle. Smooth, seamless transitions that would require tools and techniques that simply don't exist in tattooing.

Artists who try to replicate it end up either overworking the skin or delivering something that looks nothing like what the client expected.

They're drowning in AI tattoo content online. Feeds full of jaw-dropping designs that look photorealistic, impossibly detailed, perfect in every way.

None of them are real tattoos.

But clients don't always know that.

They save the image, bring it in, and expect you to produce it. When you explain it's not possible, you're suddenly the one falling short. Not the algorithm that generated a fantasy.

This is shifting expectations in a dangerous direction. Clients are benchmarking your work against images that have never touched skin.

That's a battle you can't win by just being a great artist.

You have to educate first.

The best artists doing this right now lead with transparency. They show the client what the AI got wrong.

They explain what would actually heal well, age well, look good in ten years. They reframe the conversation around craft, not just aesthetics.

That's not anti-technology.

That's just doing your job properly.

Do you refuse AI designs, use them as reference, or replicate them as-is?

Hit the poll below. One question. Answer right now and you could win a free copy of Fix Your Instagram in 30 Minutes.

Thanks for reading. If this got you thinking, hit reply and tell me where you stand on AI designs. I read every response.

See you next week.

P.S. Don't forget to vote in the poll. Takes 5 seconds and you might win something.