Creative ownership for tattoo artists isn’t about rejecting platforms. It’s about making sure the value your work creates belongs to you.
A company recently got in touch asking if I’d be interested in promoting their new marketplace. That’s nothing new. Even though the channel is quite new I’ve always received a lot of ‘business opportunity’ type requests and I usually skim them and delete them unless it’s a product or service I already use.
Quite honestly I have no interest in this channel becoming some kind of low budget version of the home shopping network. I’d prefer to promote products that I actually use and believe in for free than shill endless crap at you just to make a couple of quid.
But, initially, on the surface, this idea sounded like a perfectly reasonable proposal.
I’d list some of my artwork on their platform, tell my audience about it, earn royalties on any future sales and they’d even pay me for promoting the marketplace itself. Not bad right?
But, taking a second look at the proposal, I realised a key factor. The marketplace needed two things. Products and customers.
The products would come from creators. The customers would also come from creators.
Which made me wonder…
If I’m creating the products…
If I’m bringing the audience…
If I’m driving the traffic…
What exactly do I need the marketplace for?
If creators are providing both the inventory and the customers, perhaps we’ve misunderstood where the real value actually lies.
Perhaps we’ve misunderstood our own value entirely.
Now, that isn’t a criticism. Like a lot of small startups they’re just looking for even the smallest friction point to build a service to ‘fix’. And, I guess, they do solve genuine problems for some people. If you don’t have an audience, they might help you find one. If you don’t want to build an online shop, they might save you the hassle.
But none of that is the same as owning your business.
Over the last few years I’ve become increasingly interested in creative ownership for tattoo artists because I think it explains far more about the future of our profession than marketing ever could.
Creative Ownership for Tattoo Artists
Over the last few years I’ve noticed something happening, not just in tattooing but across almost every creative industry. We’ve all become incredibly good at building businesses on land we don’t own.
We spend years growing Instagram accounts we don’t control, uploading videos to platforms that can change the rules overnight and building audiences inside apps that decide who sees our work.
We list products on marketplaces that own the customer relationship.
We slowly begin to mistake follower counts for value while somebody else owns the infrastructure those followers exist on.
None of these things are inherently bad. I use Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and, I’ve even got a TikTok! I’ve used software built by other companies every single day for decades.
And it’s not a problem. The problem isn’t using platforms. The problem is forgetting whose asset you’re actually building.
People often say that Instagram ruined tattooing. I don’t think Instagram ruined anything. It simply behaved exactly as a business with those incentives was always going to behave. It grew, captured attention, monetised that attention and gradually shifted its priorities towards the people paying the bills rather than the people creating the content.
The more interesting question isn’t why Instagram changed.
It’s why so many of us built businesses that depended on it never changing.
Tech writer Cory Doctorow has a name for what happens next: enshittification. The details aren’t important. But, what is important is that once enough people depend on a platform, the incentives change. Whether you agree with the term or not, most of us have watched that process happen in real time.
Reach declines.
Advertising increases.
Organic discovery becomes harder.
“Pay to play” slowly becomes the default.
None of this should really surprise us. It’s simply the consequence of incentives. The companies have behaved exactly as companies with those incentives always would. Their responsibility is to build valuable businesses for their shareholders. Not protect creative careers. The mistake wasn’t that platforms became businesses.
The mistake was assuming they wouldn’t.
What really surprised me though, is that so many tattooists are now, for the first time, having to figure out how to promote their businesses without them. And I think it might come directly from our shared tattoo culture.
Finish your apprenticeship and you’ll become a tattooist. Get published and you’ll become respected. Get invited to conventions and you’ll become successful. And I sometimes wonder whether that culture made tattooing particularly vulnerable to the promises of social media.
I sometimes wonder whether we were already primed to think this way.
So when…
“Get published and you’ll become respected.”
became…
“Build a following and the algorithm will reward you.”
…it didn’t feel like a revolution. It felt familiar.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
The Gate Never Disappeared
One of the biggest promises of the early internet was that it would remove the gatekeepers. To a large extent, it did. I don’t think I’d have a YouTube channel without it. I certainly wouldn’t be writing articles like this or selling artwork directly from my own website. In many ways, it delivered exactly what it promised.
But lately I’ve started wondering if something else happened. Something hidden in the small print. Maybe we didn’t remove the gatekeepers.
Maybe we just gave the keys to a different group of people.
The magazines became platforms. The publishers became algorithms. The convention organisers became recommendation pages.
The gate never disappeared.
We just stopped recognising it
For many tattooists it feels like the internet simply removed the gatekeeper that traditionally stopped you from getting in with another gatekeeper further down the hall that says ‘now you’ve had your free entry it’s time to pay to play’.
I’ve spent the last year teaching tattooists that relevance beats reach. That attracting the right audience is more important than attracting the biggest one. Looking back, I think I’ve actually been working towards something slightly bigger.
Everything I’ve written over the last year, from Relevance Beats Reach [Internal Link] to these Notes on Tattooing [Internal Link], has really been about one thing.
Helping creative people become harder to exploit.
Not by teaching them who to fear but by helping them understand where value is created, where it accumulates and ultimately, who owns it.
Because once you understand that, the questions you ask begin to change.
You stop asking…
“What time should I post?”
You stop asking…
“How do I beat the algorithm?”
And you start asking…
“What am I actually building?”
Build Your Own House
To me, creative ownership for tattoo artists isn’t about rejecting platforms. It’s about making sure the value your work creates belongs to you.
Because there’s a huge difference between living rent free until it doesn’t suit the landlord and owning your own place. Your website is an asset. Your mailing list is an asset. Your products are assets. Your writing is an asset. Your reputation is an asset. They become more valuable over time because they belong to you.
Platforms, on the other hand, are rented. They’re brilliant at distributing your work. But, they’re much less interested in helping you own the value that work creates. They’re useful. But they’re still rented. Use them to attract attention. Use them to introduce people to your work. Use them to create opportunities.
Just don’t confuse the platform with your business.
I think creative ownership for tattoo artists is one of the biggest mental shifts creative people need to make over the next decade. It’s not about abandoning platforms. It’s not about becoming cynical about technology. It’s simply about becoming more intentional about ownership.
Because every hour you spend creating something is building value somewhere. The only question is whether that value accumulates in your business or somebody else’s. I’ve realised that these days I’m less interested in creating work that only makes somebody else’s platform more valuable.
That’s one of the reasons I built thisisourstodestroy [Internal Link]. Not because I think everyone should visit my website. Because I think everyone should have their own. It’s one of the reasons I started writing Notes on Tattooing [Internal Link] and it’s one of the reasons I wrote Relevance Beats Reach [Internal Link].
Because they live in my house and don’t depend on me winning an algorithm today.
Will I still use platforms? Of course.
But I’ll use them as tools to broaden my reach and not as foundations. Every article. Every video. Every product. Every conversation is another brick in something I can actually own and control. And maybe that’s the shift creative people need to make.
Every time you sit down to work ask yourself one question. When I finish today’s work… whose business is more valuable because I did it?
Because every hour you spend creating something is building value somewhere. The only question is where that value accumulates.
So stop spending your career renovating rented property for an uninterested landlord
And start building your own fucking house.