Local Discovery
Find nearby artists who match your style through smart, location-based search.
Marketplace · In Development
INKD
The one-stop-shop for tattoos.
The problem
Tattoo culture lives scattered across Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and outdated forums and artists juggle a dozen apps for design, booking, promotion, and payment, while clients struggle to find local artists who match their style, price, and availability.
The insight
For a $1.75B industry with over 107 million tattooed Americans (more than ⅓ of the population), there's still no platform actually built for tattoos. That gap, a centralized and tattoo-first home for both sides of the chair, is exactly what INKD fills.
What INKD does
INKD is the modern hub for tattoos, connecting artists and enthusiasts through smart discovery, AR visualization, and tools that run an artist's entire business in one place.
The Work
For tattoo enthusiasts
Explore New Tattoos
A place for artists and enthusiasts to be inspired.
For tattoo artists
Portfolio Showcase
Present your work in a portfolio built for tattoos, not borrowed from a social app.
Prospective features
AR Visualization
Preview any design on your own body in augmented reality before you commit.
Smart Booking
Book instantly with artists whose calendars sync in real time.
AI Business Assistant
An AI agent that handles scheduling, follow-ups, and admin like a personal assistant in your pocket.
Client Management
Track every relationship, consultation, and payment in one place instead of across a dozen apps.
Outcome
INKD is a project not-yet fully realised that I was building alongside friend and tattoo artist Jayden Barksdale. Full product in active development and over 100 potential clients on the waitlist.
Full description
INKD started from a frustration I kept hearing from independent artists: they were running entire businesses out of apps that were never built for it. Booking over iMessage, promotion on Instagram, scheduling somewhere else, payments through Venmo, portfolios spread across three platforms. Every part of the job lived in a different place, and none of those tools talked to each other.
INKD pulls all of it into one tattoo-first ecosystem. For artists, that means a real portfolio, integrated client management, and AI agents that handle the scheduling, follow-ups, and admin so they can focus on the actual art. For enthusiasts, it's a discovery engine, whether you're new to a city, traveling and want a piece, or just curious to admire what local and worldwide artists are putting out, with AR letting you see a design on your skin before you commit.
We also saw room for more than booking. INKD opens up marketplaces for artists to sell courses, ink, custom cartridges, and more, leaning into that one-stop-shop feel for everything tattoo related.
The market backs the bet. The U.S. tattoo industry was worth $1.75B in 2023 and is still growing, with over 107 million tattooed Americans, most of them Millennials and Gen Z who expect digital-first tools. The opportunity isn't another social app, it's the dedicated home for tattoo culture that doesn't exist yet, and that's what we're building INKD to be.