About TattooSafe

Free AR tattoo preview & pricing calculator — everything runs in your browser.

TattooSafe answers two questions people have before they get tattooed and usually cannot answer well: how big will this actually be on me, and what should it cost. It does both in your browser, with your camera, without an account and without sending anything anywhere.

The sizing problem

Tattoo designs are almost always viewed on a screen — a phone, a shop's iPad, a printed flash sheet. None of those tell you how the piece relates to your forearm. A design that looks balanced at 900 pixels wide can arrive as a palm-sized piece that swallows your wrist, or a delicate thing that disappears on a thigh.

The traditional fix is a paper stencil at the shop, which works but happens late — after you have chosen the design, booked the slot, and paid a deposit. TattooSafe moves that check to before the decision.

Two views handle it. The camera preview composites your design onto a live video feed so you can move it around your actual body at actual scale. The silhouette view draws the design on a body outline at its true share of the placement for your height, with real centimetre dimensions: useful when you want measurements rather than a vibe, and shareable with your artist.

How the silhouette is built

The body outline is a fixed figure, drawn as inline SVG. What scales is each placement: its usable area is a set fraction of the height you enter. A design 8 cm long covers about a third of a 155 cm person's inner forearm and about a quarter of a 195 cm person's, and the silhouette draws it at that proportion.

Sixteen placements are modelled, each with its own usable area: inner and outer forearm, upper arm, shoulder, wrist, chest, upper and lower back, ribs, sternum, thigh, calf, ankle, back of neck, behind the ear, and back of the hand. When you enter a design's dimensions, TattooSafe checks them against the placement's maximum and tells you whether it fits, rather than letting you find out at the shop.

Background removal

Reference images usually arrive with a white or near-white box around the artwork, which looks wrong composited onto skin. TattooSafe flood-fills inward from the image edges, removing connected regions close to the border's colour. A matte frame and the backdrop behind it come off in separate passes.

This is deliberately conservative. It clears flat backgrounds and leaves anything textured alone, because the failure mode of an aggressive algorithm — eating part of the design — is much worse than leaving a faint edge. Designs on busy or photographic backgrounds will need manual cutting out first.

The pricing side

The estimator converts dimensions into area, applies a time-per-square-inch rate for the style, adjusts for how difficult the placement is to work on, adds setup and breaks, and multiplies by an hourly rate. Every constant it uses is documented on the pricing page so you can check the reasoning rather than trust the output.

It is a sanity check, not a quote. A real quote comes from a real artist looking at a real design.

Your data

Nothing you enter or upload is sent to a server. The camera feed is processed frame by frame in the browser and never recorded. Images stay on your device. There is no account, no upload endpoint, and nothing to delete later.

This is a property of how the tool is built, not a policy that could quietly change. Full details in the privacy policy and terms of use.

Honest limitations

It is a preview, not a simulation. The overlay does not track your arm or respond to how skin moves. The optional curve setting bends it around a cylinder whose curvature you choose, which approximates a limb rather than measuring yours. Treat placement and scale as a good approximation, not a rendering.

Lighting affects the illusion. Compositing a flat image onto a lit body always reads slightly as a sticker. Judge the size and position, not the realism.

It cannot tell you if a design is good. It tells you whether it fits and roughly what it costs. Whether it is right for you is between you and your artist.

Part of Restless Forge

TattooSafe is one of several tools at Restless Forge, a one-person workshop building free, browser-first utilities. Source is on GitHub — bug reports, placement corrections, and feature requests are all welcome via the contact page.

Ready to try it? Open the preview tool.