A question asked quietly
“Is this normal?”
It gets asked between friends, in messages, after the fact. About things other artists did during a session, somewhere else, in someone else’s chair. Things they weren’t okay with but weren’t sure were unusual.
Never about the tattoo. About how they were treated while they got it.
The whole ranking, in one sentence
Keep your promises.
Get seen.
That is the algorithm. Not how often you post, not what you spend, not how well you play a feed that was never built for tattoo artists.
Say what you run. Keep it. Get put in front of the people looking for exactly that.
If you are getting tattooed
What you get out of it.
Not knowing is the problem.
You are three hours into a session, something feels off, and you have no way to tell whether it is normal. You can’t ask the person doing it. Reviews tell you whether the linework is clean. Nothing told you what the six hours were like.
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You choose first. Always.
Tell Inkling what you need: a private room, clear pricing, whatever matters. Mark each one Must or Prefer. Must is a filter and not a wish, so you are never shown an artist who does not meet it.
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Nobody can reach you first.
An artist is never shown a list of clients. They only see people who already swiped yes on them. There is no directory of women to scroll through, because there is no version of that which ends well.
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You read the session, not just the art.
The same questions about every artist, so the answers actually compare. Did you feel safe and respected. Were your boundaries honoured. Was the studio clean. Was pricing clear. Did you feel pressured. Would you book again.
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The reviews are hard to fake.
Every one is tied to a real appointment: a deposit paid through Inkling, a session date that happened, and a photo of the finished tattoo. No review without all three, in either direction. Identity is checked by a third party, and we keep only a ✓.
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Women, men and enby, side by side.
One blended score lets an artist who is fine with men and not fine with women look fine. So Inkling never blends them. You choose how you are counted when you sign up: woman, man, or non-binary. Enby answers get their own column on exactly the same terms.
How an artist appears in the app. Example figures.
Why a column can be missing
No group is shown until at least five people in it have reviewed that artist. With two or three, an artist can usually work out who wrote which review, and the whole point is that you can answer honestly without that. Below five your answers still count in every overall figure. They just are not put in a column that could point at you.
If you are a tattoo artist
What you get out of it.
Posting well and tattooing well are different skills.
Only one of them is being measured out there. Daily posts, the right trend, the right sound at the right hour, and whoever plays that best gets the reach. None of it says anything about how you run a session, or whether you do what you said you would. Plenty of people who are excellent at it are not who you would send your sister to.
Here, the only thing that moves you up is the part you actually control.
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Kept promises get you seen.
You say what you run: smoke-free, a private room, a support person welcome, breaks on long sessions. Those are the same things clients filter on, so the ones you keep are what puts you in front of the people looking for exactly that. Not the loudest portfolio.
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You are not buying attention.
No bidding, no boosting, no posting schedule to keep up with. Part of what we make goes back into bringing clients onto Inkling, so the audience is being built while you are working. What decides who they see is your record, not your ad budget.
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The work you already do finally counts.
If you run a good chair, that has never been written down anywhere you own. Reviews ask about the standards you claimed, so keeping one becomes something a stranger can see was kept, over and over, by people who were actually there.
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Every enquiry already chose you.
You are not cold-messaging anyone and nobody is cold-messaging you. You only ever see clients who swiped yes on you first, and then you decide whether you want the work.
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Nobody can invent a session you never did.
A review needs a deposit paid through Inkling, a real session date and a photo of the finished tattoo. That cuts both ways: it is why the good ones are worth something, and why a stranger cannot leave you a bad one on a whim.
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You are listed next to people who cleared the same bar.
Bloodborne pathogen certificate, licence or public health permit, studio photos, written policies. A person reads it, not a checkbox. Being listed is a monthly subscription and you see what it costs before you pay anything; you can stop it in one click.
If it goes wrong anyway
Part of what we make goes into a removal fund.
Artists pay to be listed here, and a portion of that goes into a fund that helps pay for laser removal or a cover-up after a session that went badly. It builds whether or not anyone booked that month, and the ledger is public.
It is money set aside, not money owed. There is no application, nobody is entitled to it, and asking about it can never change a review you left.
What it is not
This is not a vetting authority.
Inkling cannot guarantee anyone’s safety. A clean record is not a promise about tomorrow, and it only knows what people chose to report.
It is information to decide with. Not permission to stop paying attention.
See it
Real screens, not mockups.
Nothing here is a drawing of an app that might exist. Open either one and swipe through.
The client's experience9 screens
Swipe sideways, tap a screen to see it full size. Everything shown is example data.
The artist's experience9 screens
Kept promises get you seen. What you promise, how keeping it moves you up, and what a client sees before they choose you. Tap a screen to see it full size.
Why it exists
Nobody should need to know a tattoo artist to find out what is normal.
Until now the answer depended on who you happened to know: whether there was someone in your life you could ask, and whether they knew you well enough to ask. If there wasn’t, you guessed. That is not a gap in anyone’s judgement, it is a gap in what has ever been written down.
So Inkling writes it down. The same questions about every artist, every answer tied to a real appointment, and it belongs to the people who were in the chair.
The ask
Leave your email.
Inkling is in a private beta. Leave your email and we'll let you know when we're set up. One email, nothing else.