Can AI be your studio sidekick?

(A tattoo artist investigates the question)

In the past several years, the rise of AI technology has very clearly impacted many industries. Tech moguls have sprinted to develop their own AI capabilities and noisily promote them to the public. As a user experience designer working in technology, I’ve viewed this shift with curiosity as well as skepticism. And as someone who is newly learning to tattoo I’ve also wondered… what might the impact be to the field of tattooing? How could clients and tattooers use AI to their benefit? What are the ethics of doing so? 

Thankfully AI isn’t capable of actually tattooing people…yet. But AI technology is still abundantly available: ChatGPT for chat-based inquiry, Midjourney for image generation, Sora for video content, and the list continues. These services are publicly available and easy for folks (including tattooers and their clients) to access. 

An experiment:

In the spirit of exploration, I decided to test out how Google’s AI assistant, Gemini, could help me come up with an image for a tattoo. (Midjourney required a subscription, and your frugal author was decidedly unenthused.)

My request was goofy, yet simple: a lion with flames coming out of its mouth. 

The result, well…decidedly less stellar than expected. As you can see, the flames are not, indeed, exploding from the maws of our subject.

Ask Gemini to add a flame border, however, and it hits the mark. 

I decided to give it another shot with a separate prompt: A heart with sparrows and a ‘Lisa Simpson’ banner.

However generic the resulting design, you can’t argue that it meets the criteria. It’s certainly not the tattoo I’d want, but you could imagine for someone struggling to visualize their idea, it’s a start. 

Does this replace the role of tattooer as designer? Certainly not. But given that many clients lack the language to describe what they want, it becomes a tool for further communication. 

How we shouldn’t use AI (as tattooers):

Enlisting the help of your friendly internet know-it-all, to create reference material you can draw from is one thing. Feeding it your drawings to spit out an image that you claim as your own is another. 

If you’re using an AI image generator to create designs, it’s important that your clients understand this. Simply adding a disclaimer to images or posts can help build trust in your process. It’s fun to explore and incorporate new technologies into your practice, but they shouldn’t replace or misrepresent your skills in drawing and tattooing. 

How we might use AI (as tattooers):

In my unofficial survey of fellow artists in the Denver area, it was unanimously agreed that Instagram has become a cesspool. A black hole into which tattooers cast their lovingly drawn designs to be glanced at by a meager 10% of their following’s eyeballs. Given that we’d rather spend more time actually making art, writing captions for social media is perhaps an opportunity for AI’s help. 

I asked ChatGPT to take a look at a tattoo I’d created a few weeks back and write a promotional post for it. I won’t lie to you, dear reader: my expectations were low. 

While I had to fight my initial recoil at its wordiness, ChatGPT had at least provided a scaffolding for the post: descriptive language, a clear call to action, and a few relevant hashtags. Did I edit and trim language in this post? Yes, but it did save me a bit of time staring at that blank caption area wondering what the heck I’m doing with my life. This is a tiny use case to be fair, but it opens the door to brainstorming ideas of where AI might assist us as tattooers. 

So I’m curious to know: how do you think AI should or shouldn’t be used when it comes to tattooing? I want to hear your thoughts. Shoot me an email at envypattern@gmail.com, and tell me what you think.

Full disclosure: I am not an expert in AI or tattooing. I started my tattoo apprentice journey in November of 2023 and count myself lucky to still be learning from some truly talented folks (shout out to Babs!).

Side note: I did not, in fact, use AI to create this post. All grammatical errors and unnecessary verbosity are mine alone ;)