“You see it the morning of”
This is the step people push back on and it is the one with the clearest reasoning.
A design sent by email a week ahead gets looked at on a phone, at the wrong size, flat, on a screen, usually while distracted. What comes back is notes on a picture rather than reactions to a tattoo. Half of them are about things that will look completely different once the stencil is on a curved body at actual scale.
So you see it as a stencil, on your skin, in the place it is going, at the size it will be, on the morning of. You can move it, resize it, or stop entirely at that point. Nobody has ever regretted saying so at the stencil and several people have regretted not.
One round of small changes
Built into every booking, by email during the drawing period: proportions, an element in or out, a placement adjustment. That is normal and expected.
What is a new consult is a change of concept. If the brief was a heron and you now want a wolf, that is not a revision, it is a different tattoo, and pretending otherwise is how artists end up doing four unpaid drawings for one booking. The new consult is free; the date moves.
What we will not tattoo
Anything we would not wear. In practice that is: another artist’s design copied rather than referenced, text in a language nobody here reads, hands, faces or necks on a first tattoo, and anything on somebody who has been drinking.
Every one of those is in the studio policy with the reasoning attached, and all of them are said at the consult rather than discovered on the day.