Why Is the Tattoo Business Slow? is a phrase I’ve been hearing from tattoo artists over and over again recently.
And by slow, they don’t mean that tattooing has become slower. They mean there seem to be fewer clients, fewer enquiries, quieter books and more empty days than there used to be.
When you talk to enough tattooists, particularly people who’ve been doing this for a long time, there’s a real sense that something has changed. But I’ve been wondering whether we’re actually describing the problem correctly.
Because if you look at the bigger picture, the evidence doesn’t really suggest that people have suddenly stopped wanting tattoos. Tattoos have become more culturally accepted, not less. The number of tattoo studios in Britain has more than doubled over the last decade, and something like 28% of British adults now have tattoos.
So perhaps the problem isn’t that tattooing has become unpopular. Perhaps there are simply more people selling tattoos.
And I think that’s true. But there are probably several things happening at the same time
Why Are Tattoo Artists Getting Fewer Clients?
The first is the economy. Tattoos are a discretionary purchase. Nobody needs one. You can put it off for another month, another year, or indefinitely. We’ve come through inflation and rising living costs and people are understandably more careful about where their disposable income goes.
We’re also comparing today’s tattoo economy with a particularly strange period in tattooing’s history. The years after lockdown were extraordinary. People had money they hadn’t spent, experiences they’d missed, holidays they’d postponed and a huge appetite to do things again.
Tattooing benefited from that release of pent-up demand. So, if you became accustomed to being booked solid during that period, today’s market is going to feel absolutely brutal.
Has Instagram Stopped Working for Tattoo Artists?
There’s one, overly simple ‘answer’ that I hear a lot from people who’ve been around for a long time. Instagram killed tattooing.
Yeah, OK, it isn’t the same platform it was ten years ago. The way people discover artists has changed, and the number of artists competing for attention has exploded.
So an artist can quite reasonably look at their enquiries drying up and think, “my tattoo business slow, Instagram doesn’t work anymore.” But that’s confusing the way people find tattoo artists with whether people want tattoos. Instagram may have become a less effective way of capturing demand. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean the demand has disappeared.
Why Is There More Competition Between Tattoo Artists?
There’s something much more significant happening underneath all of this. Access has changed everything.
Information is everywhere. Equipment is everywhere. Training is everywhere. Reference material is everywhere. Social media means an artist can find an audience without ever having to establish themselves locally.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
But every time you make an industry easier to enter, you increase the number of people who can offer the thing that industry sells. Tattooing may now be running into the consequence of its own success.
The thing that was once difficult to access has become much easier to access. Which means that being able to produce a tattoo has become less scarce. We’ve seen this before in other creative industries.
Photography didn’t disappear when cameras became easier to use. Graphic design didn’t disappear when software made competent design available to almost everybody. Music didn’t disappear when recordings became infinitely reproducible.
What changed was the value of the thing being produced.
When production becomes easier and more abundant, production itself becomes less distinctive. The value starts moving somewhere else.
Towards taste.
Towards judgement.
Towards experience.
Towards relationships.
Towards the person behind the thing.
Tattooing is beginning to experience exactly the same shift.
What Makes an Experienced Tattoo Artist Valuable?
For someone who’s been tattooing for twenty years, that’s a particularly uncomfortable thing to hear. Because you might reasonably think: I’ve spent twenty years developing this skill. I’ve built a reputation. I’ve learned how to work with people, composition, colour, placement, skin and all the other things that come from doing this for decades.
So, why should I be struggling to find work when someone who’s been tattooing for two years can put themselves in exactly the same marketplace?
The answer isn’t that those twenty years don’t matter. It’s that experience only becomes a competitive advantage when the customer can see and value what that experience gives them.
So if you’ve been tattooing for twenty years, I wouldn’t start by telling you to work harder. I wouldn’t tell you to make more reels, post more often, lower your prices, produce more flash or become available seven days a week.
I’d ask you a different question: What can you do now that twenty years of experience allows you to do that somebody with two years simply hasn’t had the opportunity to learn yet?
What do you see that they don’t?
What decisions can you make?
What mistakes can you prevent?
What can you tell a client about their idea that they couldn’t discover from Pinterest?
What is your taste?
What is your judgement?
Because those things are much harder to reproduce than the art itself.
And don’t get stuck in a nostalgia loop either. There’s a dangerous version of this argument where the veteran says, “The industry has changed. Nobody appreciates quality anymore.”
That’s not a business strategy. Yes, the market has changed. Your job is to understand how.
I’ve actually had to confront this myself recently.
For years I’ve sold people artwork based on a brief. Someone would come to me with an idea, we’d talk about it, I’d interpret that idea through my own experience and make them something unique.
That was the product. And for a long time, it worked.
But particularly this year I’ve noticed a massive drop in enquiries. I could have responded in all the usual ways. Had a sale. Offered discounts. Made more posts. Tried to convince people they were wrong for not buying my work.
Instead, I started asking myself a different question: Where has the value moved?
Because the customer hasn’t necessarily stopped wanting the thing. What’s changed is what they can do before they ever get to me.
They can now take an idea and generate multiple visual interpretations of it in seconds. Try this version, then that version, change the style, change the composition, change the colours and keep going until they find something they like.
And if that’s what the customer actually wants now, I have to take that seriously. So I had to put my ego to one side and ask myself a fairly uncomfortable question: Has my job changed?
And the answer is yes.
Sadly, yes.
Because if my job used to be taking somebody’s brief and turning it into a visual object, then that part of my job has become much less valuable. I can either complain about that, or I can ask myself what the twenty years I’ve spent doing this are actually useful for now.
And that’s where I’ve landed.
I don’t think my twenty years of experience have become worthless. So, I’ve been looking at where to apply them. Perhaps my experience has become more valuable to my clients as a tattooer than it is as an artist?
Because tattooing isn’t simply about producing an image. It’s about taking an image, an idea, a person, a body, a piece of skin, a particular placement and a particular moment in somebody’s life, and making a series of decisions about all of those things.
That’s judgement. And that’s something that can’t be outsourced to a machine.
So now, when a client brings me an AI-generated idea or a Pinterest tattoo, I don’t need to dismiss it. I can use my experience to advise them. That’s the job.
And perhaps that’s the question a lot of experienced tattoo artists need to start asking themselves.
Not: “How do I get back to the way things were?” But: “If the thing people used to pay me for has become easier to produce, what is my experience worth now?”
What Should Tattoo Artists Do When the Market Changes?
And I think there’s a warning here for the people entering tattooing now too.
You have more access than any previous generation of tattoo artists. But don’t mistake access for security. You can learn the techniques. You can buy the machines. You can find the references. You can watch the tutorials. You can build the Instagram account.
You can produce something that looks remarkably similar to something produced by an artist who’s been doing it for years. But that’s exactly the problem.
If everybody has access to the same information, the information stops being the thing that differentiates you. So don’t spend your entire career trying to become technically competent and assume that competence will eventually create a successful business.
Learn to develop taste.
Learn to make decisions.
Learn to understand people.
Develop a point of view.
Build relationships.
Learn why something works rather than simply how to reproduce it. And understand that experience isn’t something you can download. Because perhaps the challenge for tattoo artists now isn’t simply to become better at producing tattoos.
Perhaps it’s to become harder to replace.
For the experienced artist, that means making years of accumulated knowledge visible and valuable.
For the new artist, it means understanding that access gets you into the room. It doesn’t give anybody a reason to choose you.
Tattooing hasn’t necessarily become less valuable.
Being able to tattoo has.
And maybe that’s the change we’re all feeling.