Articles

Tattoo pricing, sizing, and the decisions worth making before the needle.

Two questions come up before almost every tattoo, and both are harder to answer than they look. What should this cost? And how big should it actually be?

The pricing question has a real answer — studios quote by time, and time comes from area, style and placement in a specific order. Once you know that order, a quote stops being a number you either accept or flinch at and becomes something you can reason about. The sizing question is subtler, because the failure is systematic: screens make designs look bigger than they arrive, and almost nobody corrects for it in the right direction.

These articles cover both, using the same figures the pricing calculator uses, so you can check the reasoning instead of trusting the output. Neither is a substitute for talking to your artist — they are what makes that conversation go better.

Both of these came out of building the estimator. Pricing had to model what studios actually charge for — time, driven by area, style and placement in that order — before the tool could produce a number worth showing. Sizing had to model why a design that looks right on a phone reads as too small on skin, which turns out to be a fixed relationship between screen size and body proportion rather than a matter of taste.

Neither replaces a conversation with your artist. They exist so that conversation starts from a realistic number instead of a guess, and so a quote higher than you expected is something you can understand rather than just accept. What the preview can and cannot do is covered in the FAQ.