A few months ago I found myself doing something that, on paper at least, made absolutely no sense. I switched back to Photoshop.
If you’ve followed my work for any length of time you’ll know I’d more or less abandoned Adobe a few years ago. Like many people, I grew tired of subscriptions and rented software. I moved over to Affinity Photo and, for the most part, I was perfectly happy there.
In some respects it’s probably the better product. It’s cheaper, it handles a few things better than Photoshop and it avoids much of the baggage that comes with Adobe’s ecosystem.
And yet, after a couple of years away, I found myself returning.
Not because Photoshop had suddenly become a better piece of software. Not because Adobe had won me back with some revolutionary feature. The truth was much less dramatic. Photoshop simply fits the way I work better. Even though it isn’t the best it fits my workflow in a way that Affinity doesn’t.
I’ve been thinking about that switch quite a bit recently. Because – I think – it illustrates a major difference in how I approach my setup compared to my friends. You see my tattooist friends tend to spend an enormous amount of time thinking about tools and – in my opinion – not nearly enough time thinking about workflows.
And that’s understandable. Tools are tangible. You can hold them in your hand. You can buy them. You can photograph them. You can compare specifications and watch reviews on YouTube. But workflows are different. They’re mostly invisible. They exist in habits, routines and decisions.
They reveal themselves slowly over time. And perhaps, that’s why we’re so easily distracted by equipment.
Let’s face it. Like lots of other creatives in other industries, tattooists have always loved gear. Machines, cartridges, printers, tablets, armrests, software, furniture. Spend enough time around tattoo artists and you’ll discover that many of us enjoy discussing equipment almost as much as we enjoy discussing tattoos.
I’m certainly no exception.
I’ve spent much of my adult life around tattoo equipment. At one point I was involved in marketing some of it. Part of my ‘job’ was persuading tattooists that a particular product deserved their attention.
But before you jump to conclusions, no, this isn’t a piece about why new technology is bad. Quite the opposite in fact. I love innovation. And some of the tools available to tattooists today would have seemed miraculous only a few decades ago.
What interests me is something else entirely.
Why Your Tattoo Workflow Should Come Before Your Tools
Lately I’ve started wondering whether we’re occasionally getting the relationship backwards. Whether we’ve become so interested in tools that we’ve stopped asking what place they occupy within a workflow.
Or, more importantly, whether they deserve a place there at all.
Like my guitar playing friends with nine distortion pedals on their board, gain staging their way to a sound that an old valve amp just does when you switch it on. Is it actually better?
That thought first occurred to me because of a printer.
Years ago, when I first discovered a Brother thermal printer, I was genuinely excited about it. But not for the reasons people often assume. I wasn’t interested in printing gradients. I wasn’t trying to reinvent the stencil process. I wasn’t looking for a revolutionary new approach to tattooing and I certainly wasn’t hoping I’d become known as the font of all knowledge when it came to these little printers.
I simply had a problem.
I liked creating hand-drawn stencils, but hand-drawn stencils have a frustrating characteristic. As I’m sure you know, they’re essentially single-use. If something gets damaged or needs altering, you’re often starting the process again from the beginning.
What I wanted was a way of creating those same stencils digitally in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet and then printing them whenever I needed them. And that little printer solved that problem beautifully. It didn’t require me to change the way I worked. It just slotted into my workflow and allowed me to continue working in the same way while removing one of the major frustrations built into my process.
Years later something similar happened when the iPad gained the ability to function as a second display for a Mac. Suddenly I could draw directly onto a screen rather than working through a graphics tablet.
Again, the appeal wasn’t novelty. It was utility.
The workflow improved and the tool earned its place. Looking back, I think that’s why both technologies stuck and are still part of my workflow today. They answered questions I already had.
Because the problem existed before the solution arrived.
A Good Tattoo Workflow Solves Problems Before Tools Do
And that’s not only important, it’s obvious, at least to me. But these days I’m not sure that decision-making process is as obvious to tattooists as it once was.
And for a few, less than obvious, reasons.
Recently I came across a company promoting stencil film that you could print directly onto in full colour. It has an adhesive layer and makes all sorts of beneficial claims. Cool, right? But while I was looking at the product I found myself asking a question that I seem to be asking myself more and more these days.
And that’s:
What problem is this solving?
Not in a sarcastic sense. It’s a genuine question. Like, really, what is the problem this solves? When it comes to creating stencils we’ve been refining a process, one generation of tattooists at a time, since the early nineteen hundreds.
We can already create clear stencils. We can already control how long they stay on the skin and we can already position and reposition them accurately. So what benefits exactly does this latest ‘game-changer’ offer? The longer I looked at it, the more I realised I wasn’t evaluating the product itself. There’s actually nothing wrong with the film. As a product, it works.
But it doesn’t solve any problem I can see that led to its creation.
And that felt significant somehow.
What Mature Industries Teach Us About Innovation
Because once you start looking for the problem instead of the solution, you begin noticing something interesting about mature industries. When an industry is young, most innovation is driven by necessity. Problems are abundant and obvious.
The early pioneers of electric tattooing weren’t searching for excuses to buy new gadgets. They were trying to improve an existing process. Hand tattooing was slow, physically demanding and difficult to scale.
The electric machine wasn’t searching for a problem to answer. It was an answer. The workflow came first. The tool came second. And the tool earned its place based purely on merit, not hype.
But as industries like ours mature, that begins to change.
As all the obvious problems are solved, growth continues to be expected, products continue to be developed, companies continue to compete and genuinely transformative problems become harder to find.
That doesn’t mean innovation stops. It means the incentives start shifting and a solution begins arriving looking for a problem to solve.
Yeah, I know, that’s a tough one, right? Let me explain it a bit more!
Companies still need growth. Products still need customers. And when genuinely transformative problems become harder to find, it’s perhaps inevitable that smaller and smaller frustrations begin getting presented as major obstacles.
Once you start looking at tattooing through that lens, you see examples everywhere. For instance, the conversation surrounding modern Brother clone stencil printers is one of them.
Much of the marketing focuses on the ability to print tones and gradients directly into a stencil. The promise is usually some version of the same idea: less preparation, less work, greater efficiency.
Maybe that’s true. But maybe it isn’t.
What interests me is that, blinded by the marketing promises, we often miss the fact that the labour—the work—hasn’t disappeared and, more importantly, the decisions haven’t disappeared either.
They’ve simply moved elsewhere in the workflow. Think about the stencil-making process and how it relates to tattooing.
Why New Tattoo Equipment Doesn’t Always Improve Your Tattoo Workflow
Traditionally, many stencil-related decisions happen during the stencilling stage, where mistakes are cheap and revisions are easy. You can simplify, clarify and experiment.
And you can always hit Command-Z, right?
But when some of those decisions move onto the skin, the nature of the work changes and the cost of those decisions becomes much higher.
With a stencil that is essentially a picture made of gradients which will wipe off very easily, you now have to make stencil decisions in the skin. You line the eyes so you don’t wipe them off, but even if you bloodline them, any mistakes are now permanent.
No Command-Z once you’re tattooing.
That simple change—optimising a workflow to suit the tool rather than making the tool earn its place in the existing workflow—all to solve a problem that you didn’t have, has suddenly made stencil making incredibly stressful.
And that’s the question I keep coming back to. Not whether a tool is impressive. Whether it improves the workflow or not. And they’re not the same thing.
Good Marketing Isn’t the Villain
I’m starting to suspect that many of the most recent developments in tattooing have very little to do with the products themselves. But a lot more to do with the incentives surrounding them.
Manufacturers need growth. Tattooists want improvement. Both desires are perfectly reasonable incentives. But sometimes those incentives intersect in ways that produce unexpected outcomes.
Not because anybody is behaving badly. Quite the opposite, actually. Everybody is behaving rationally. And that’s perhaps the most useful thing I’ve learned from spending time with one foot on either side of the velvet rope in tattooing.
For all of the online arguments about this and that, most problems don’t emerge because somebody is a villain. They emerge because a system encourages certain rational behaviours, but those behaviours create consequences nobody intended or expected.
We waste our time looking for the bad guy or the smoking gun. When we’d be much better off if we zoom out, look at the big picture for what it is and realise that there is no ‘great conspiracy’, just an industry that is maturing and trying to continue to innovate at a point where true innovation is increasingly rare.
Because mature industries don’t stop innovating.
They just start arguing about increasingly smaller problems.
The Question Every Tattooist Should Ask Before Buying New Tattoo Equipment
I also think understanding this distinction is particularly important if you’re new to tattooing, or if you’ve hit one of those speed bumps in your career that makes you start looking for a new tool to fix things.
Because that’s when we’re most vulnerable.
Not to bad products.
But to good marketing.
Because good marketing can convince you to buy a bad product.
Maybe the most useful question a tattooist can ask about a new product isn’t:
“What does this do?”
Maybe it’s:
“What problem does this solve?”
And perhaps an even better one:
“Would I have noticed that problem if nobody had tried to sell me the solution?”