People have been getting tattoos since at least the second half of the Stone Age. Designs have changed over the millennia, from geometric patterns and body-spanning portraits to beating red hearts dedicated to the mothers of the world.
But despite changing tastes, a lot about the medium has changed not changed over the past twelve thousand years: tattoos have always been as much about the tattoo artist as they are about the design, susceptible to the smallest movements, mistakes, abilities and sensitivities of any tattoo artist. No two tattoos, even from the same administrator, have ever been exactly the same.
It looks like that’s all about to change. On Thursday, the company Blackdot, a high-tech tattoo startup, simultaneously launched an automated tattoo platform, a flagship tattoo studio in Austin, Texas (the first of several planned to open across the United States), and a series of partnerships with leading artists from numerous disciplines. Collectively, they want to redefine what it means to get a tattoo, give a tattoo and design one.
Tattoos made with the Blackdot device. Image: Blackdot
The company’s patented tattooing device, perfected over the past five years by a team of PhD engineers, reads a subject’s skin to determine exactly how much ink to apply, and at what depth, in individual, dotted steps of about 250 microns in diameter – about twice the width of a human hair.
With automated precision and while causing significantly less pain (the company claims) than a typical tattoo gun, the Blackdot device can ink any pre-programmed design – a pattern, a painting, even an image – onto any skin type or body. area.
A hyper-detailed Blackdot tattoo inspired by the Mona Lisa. Image: Blackdot
“When you see it in real life, you almost shit your pants,” Steve Godoy, a 37-year-old veteran of the Los Angeles tattoo scene, told Decrypt’s SCENE of a Mona Lisa tattoo created by Blackdot that he saw in person. “The technical nature of this thing… it’s about half an inch high and maybe an inch wide. It’s a category all its own. It is its own specific art form.”
Godoy is a tattoo artist and former professional skateboarder who, among other things, collaborated with his twin brother Art to perform all the tattoos on Julia Gnuse, the once Guinness World Record holder for most tattooed woman in the world. He currently serves as an advisor to Blackdot, a kind of ambassador for the company from the traditional tattoo world.
He grew up in the biker-dominated, punk-heavy tattoo scene of the early 1980s, when artists and tattoo parlors were incredibly secretive, interconnected, and fiercely protective of the craft. Although the artist believes that the spirit has since been ‘diluted’ in the intervening years, he believes that Blackdot’s standardization of quality and prioritization of artistry has the potential to reverse that trend.
“That’s what the tattoo industry used to be, and should have been, if it wasn’t saturated and exploited,” Godoy says. “This goes all the way back to the roots.”
Thanks to Blackdot’s unique technical process, a variety of designs can now be applied with surgical precision as standardized tattoos wherever a Blackdot studio location is located, by any trained staff member.
Turkish tattoo artist Omer Tunca is working on a handmade tattoo. His designs can now be turned into tattoos worldwide via the Blackdot platform. Image: Blackdot
The development has already broken the geographical and medium barriers. Acclaimed Turkish tattoo artist Omer Tunca today released a tattoo collection on Blackdot that any customer can now have applied to their body exactly as the artist envisioned, without having to travel to Istanbul. Digital artist Tyler Hobbs (“Fidenza,” “QQL”) also released a collection today, bringing his sought-after code-generated designs to the medium of the human body for the first time.
Generative one-on-one tattoos designed by generative artist Tyler Hobbs, for Blackdot. Image: Blackdot
John Craig, who designed the iconic album covers for the 1995 Smashing Pumpkins album ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’, has also contributed artwork from that project to create a collection of Blackdot tattoos.
The design costs for these first tattoos range in price from $400 to $8,000, with execution costs between $600 and $1,850. The available designs will soon expand through the Blackdot Certified Artist (BCA) program, which will admit artists to the platform and allow them to upload their own tattoo designs and accept custom commissions. Key to the company’s business model is a royalty system that ensures artists receive a creator fee every time their designs are used in a Blackdot studio.
Blackdot plans to use NFTs to support that royalty system, as well as track the scarcity and status of certain limited-edition collections (for example, only 50 tattoos will be made of each Omer Tunca design). While these features haven’t been rolled out yet, Blackdot also plans to eventually roll out a Tradeable Tattoo program that will allow users to sell designs for potential tattoos on secondary markets as NFTs and keep digital memories of purchased compositions. The company also hopes to roll out a stablecoin payment option soon.
Artist Tyler Hobbs collaborates with Blackdot on tattoo designs. Image: Blackdot
Blackdot founder Joel Pennington had zero tattoos when he first came up with the idea for the company. He was a serial entrepreneur who worked in the coffee industry at the time. Being around so many inked baristas started to turn the wheels in his brain, and after some research, he felt like he had discovered a huge flaw in the existing tattoo industry.
“What people really wanted were smaller pieces that were very detailed, like the size of a credit card or less,” Pennington said. SCENE. “But you’d have to fly to New York or LA, and you’d have to get on some sort of year-long waiting list, or the artists might not even want to work with you because you’re not a public figure or a celebrity.”
A mock-up of a tattoo chair at Blackdot’s flagship studio in Austin. Image: Blackdot
After five years of research, development, testing and refinement – with Pennington eventually getting tattoos himself, one of which was partially applied by his two young daughters with a Blackdot machine – he thinks he’s found the perfect formula to create the tattoo on his head to put. industry.
Blackdot founder Joel Pennington. Image: Blackdot
But the entrepreneur is also careful to emphasize that Blackdot’s reason for existence The intention is not to become the Uber of tattoo parlors, or to put local shops out of business. To him, a Blackdot tattoo represents a new genre of body art, one that could create a whole new ecosystem of artists and customers.
“What we’re doing isn’t for everyone, it’s for one segment of the market,” Pennington said. “This is really just technology that allows tattoo artists to scale, and allows other artists to participate in a market that has been off-limits in the past.”