Ironwood Tattoo & PiercingPortfolio site →
Tattoo studios
Tattoo studio website design,
built around the inquiry.
Nobody books a nine‑hour back piece from a dropdown. Custom work starts with a conversation, and a tattoo studio site earns its keep by opening that conversation with the details your artist actually needs.
What this build puts first
From the first message to the last session.
Those are what change for a tattoo studio. The rest is the same on every build: design, copy, booking, search, a year of hosting and edits, and a site you own. It is all on the services page, and the money is on pricing.
You own everything
Your web address and your site are in your name from day one. Leave whenever you want and take all of it with you.
Seven‑day guarantee
If your preview is not in your hands by day seven, I refund half the build fee and launch the site free.
Payment, plainly
Half to reserve your build week, half when you approve the preview, before the site goes live.
The problem, precisely
“How much for a sleeve.” Sent at eleven at night.
Four messages later you have learned it is a forearm piece, not a sleeve. Black‑and‑grey. Fine‑line, from a screenshot of another artist’s work. Budget, sixty dollars. Twenty minutes gone, and a real custom half sleeve sits two days unanswered in the same inbox.
A salon runs out of chair time. A tattoo studio runs out of something scarcer: the artist’s attention, the same resource that draws the piece and does the tattoo. Every unqualified message spends it.
So the inquiry is the site. Everything below follows one, from the field it lands in to the day the client sits down.
Station one · the form
Eight fields, and the first reply can be a real answer.
A generic contact form cannot do this work. Every field below exists because leaving it out costs somebody an hour.
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(01)
Placement, and which side.
“Arm” is four different tattoos: inner or outer forearm, upper arm, wrapped or not. Placement decides the drawing, the stencil and the price.
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(02)
Size, in inches.
Small and medium mean nothing between strangers. Ask for both dimensions, with a credit card or a palm for scale. It is the difference between quoting a session and quoting a day.
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(03)
Reference images, with a rule attached.
Two to five uploads, with the policy stated in the field: references are welcome, copies of another artist’s finished tattoo are not.
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(04)
Color, or black‑and‑grey.
The field that routes the inquiry. Paired with your real style tags (blackwork, fine‑line, traditional, neo‑traditional, realism, stick‑and‑poke), it reaches the artist who does that work.
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(05)
Fresh skin, cover‑up, or touch‑up.
Three different jobs. A cover‑up needs a daylight photograph before anyone can say yes, and a touch‑up may be free inside your window and charged outside it.
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(06)
Budget, as a band.
An open box gets blank answers. Three or four ranges get honest ones, and nobody drives across town to learn the number never worked.
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(07)
Availability, in real terms.
Not a date picker. Weekdays or weekends, how far out they can wait, and whether they can sit a full day rather than a run of two‑hour evenings.
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(08)
Age, and the ID they will bring.
One checkbox, one sentence. It filters the inquiry that was never legal to take, early enough that nobody finds out at the counter.
Age and ID, beside the form
Age rules are set by state, and many shops set a higher floor, so a short block next to the form gives the age you tattoo from, the ID you accept and that consent is signed in person. It also covers the basics: nobody is tattooed intoxicated, eat beforehand, and mention blood thinners, pregnancy or recent sun. Med spa sites carry a heavier version of the same gate, for medical reasons rather than legal ones.
Then the part most shops skip: the reply the form sends back. Two automatic lines saying inquiries are read on Mondays and answered within a week. Setting the expectation is what makes a reply on day six feel prompt.
Ironwood Tattoo & Piercing · portfolio site
See it working
A tattoo studio site I built.
Ironwood Tattoo & Piercing is the tattoo studio in the portfolio. It runs a consult request instead of a booking button, asking for placement, references and the artist before anyone talks about a date. Four artists, style pages, and house rules and aftercare on pages of their own. Open it on your phone, where your clients will meet yours.
Station two · two doors
Flash books like an appointment. Custom books like a project.
Flash is already drawn and already priced. Pick the design, pick a slot, pay the deposit. The one part of a tattoo site that behaves like a salon. Custom is a different shape: inquiry, conversation, drawing, deposit, then a session or four.
A single Book now button cannot serve both. The flash client hits an eight‑field brief for a piece hanging on your wall at a set price and closes the tab. The custom client books the longest slot the calendar offers and arrives expecting a back piece in two hours.
Flash
A gallery of available designs, each priced, each marked repeatable or one‑of‑one. Straight to a slot and a deposit.
Custom
The eight‑field inquiry, routed by style. No calendar until there is a drawing and a deposit to schedule around.
Flash day
Its own dated page: designs, the date, first‑come or booked ahead, and the deposit rule for that day only.
Station three · the deposit
The one paragraph that ends most arguments.
Ask any shop where its disputes come from and the answer is the deposit, not the price, not the work. Somebody reschedules twice, or does not show, and discovers a rule nobody put in writing. Most deposit arguments start that way, which is why the policy belongs where the client pays.
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(01)
Non‑refundable, in those words.
Not “generally non‑refundable,” and not a clause on a terms page. One sentence, where the client pays it. The deposit buys the drawing and holds the day, both spent before anyone sits down.
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(02)
Applied to the final session.
The line shops leave out, and the one that causes the argument. A client who thinks it came off the first session arrives on day four with the wrong cash.
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(03)
What forfeits it.
A no‑show. A reschedule inside your notice window (forty‑eight or seventy‑two hours, whichever you actually enforce). Arriving intoxicated. Abandoning the design after the drawing is finished.
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(04)
How long it holds the date.
A deposit is not a permanent credit. Say how long it stays live, how many reschedules it survives, and whether it transfers to another artist. For most shops the honest answer to that last one is no.
The charge runs through whatever you already use: Square, Stripe, your booking platform, a payment link sent with the drawing. What the site owes you is placement, and that paragraph belongs above the submit button, on each artist’s page, and in the confirmation email. Not on a terms page nobody opens.
Station four · the number
An hourly rate on its own reads like a warning.
A first‑timer sees an hourly rate and does arithmetic in the dark. They cannot tell whether their piece is two hours or eleven, so they invent the worst number and leave. The fix is not to hide the rate but to surround it.
Then one sentence carries the rest: custom work is quoted after the drawing, because the drawing determines the time. Clients rarely push back on a quote given that way, because they can see what it is based on.
Shop minimum
Lead with it. The floor for any piece however small, and the thing that stops the sixty‑dollar inquiry before it is written.
Hourly
Per artist where it varies. A second‑year resident and a guest of fifteen years should not share one number to keep the page tidy.
Day rate
What it costs, and what a day means: six hours or eight. It usually saves money on a large piece, and saying so sells the large piece.
Station five · the artist
Nobody drives across a city for a shop.
They drive for a person whose work they have been watching for months. So each artist gets a page: their gallery and no one else’s, their style tags, their rate if it differs, and an inquiry route that reaches them alone. One shared gallery of everyone’s best work is a dead end.
The part that gets forgotten is the state of the books. An artist closed for four months still needs a page, but the form has to say so or it collects inquiries nobody can answer. Two states, one switch: books open, answered Mondays, or books closed until spring, join the waitlist.
Barbershops hit the same wall from the opposite direction: a walk‑in shop treated like an appointment book.
Residents
Own gallery, own tags and rate, own inquiry route. Their portfolio is the shop’s portfolio, and the deepest thing on the site.
Apprentices
Said plainly: supervised, learning, priced accordingly. Clients seek out apprentice work on purpose. Hiding it helps nobody.
Alumni
When an artist leaves, their work leaves with them. A gallery still showing them sends your best inquiries three states away.
Station six · dates that expire
A guest spot lives for six days, then it should vanish.
Guest artists, flash days and conventions are the only genuinely urgent thing a tattoo studio sells. A visiting artist is in town Tuesday to Sunday and fills the week if anyone hears in time. Announced only in an Instagram story, it is gone in a day and unsearchable.
A dated block solves it: the artist, the dates, a dozen images of their work, and its own inquiry route that closes when the dates pass. Five minutes to add, one to retire. And it gets found by people searching the guest’s name.
Conventions run the other way. Half the shop is gone for a weekend and somebody drives over anyway. The same block, saying closed rather than open, saves the trip and points them at the booth.
Station seven · the product
Healed work is what they are buying.
Everything else on the site is plumbing around the photographs. A client picks an artist from a photograph on a phone, usually at a glance, and no caption rescues a bad one.
Almost every shop shows only fresh work, because fresh is what is in front of you when the piece is finished. But fresh is red, raised, shining under ointment or hazed behind saniderm, and the line looks heavier than it ever will again. Show healed work too, and label which is which.
Black‑and‑grey is where phones do the most damage: direct flash on wet skin blows the highlights and crushes the greys flat, and five hours of shading disappears. Even, indirect light, no flash, no heavy contrast.
Color has the opposite problem. Warm shop lighting drags reds orange and turns the greens in a neo‑traditional piece muddy.
And photograph the range of skin you actually tattoo, or the portfolio quietly tells a share of its readers they are not the client.
Soft light · no flash · healed
On the build side: full‑width, high‑resolution files that open on a tap, cropped for a phone before a desktop, and no watermark dragged across the piece it exists to show.
Station eight · after
The page that gets texted to people who are not your clients yet.
A client leaves wrapped, holding spoken instructions they will have forgotten by Thursday. Then something looks wrong on day three at eleven at night, and they search rather than text you. If your aftercare lives on your own site as a page (not a PDF, not a story), that search lands on you.
Cover what people actually ask: how long saniderm stays on, washing and ointment, what day three normally looks like, the short list of things that are not normal, then sun, pools, the gym and your touch‑up window.
It is also a page people search for on their own, which makes it cheap visibility that keeps working long after the session. Lash studios get the same return from their aftercare page, for the same reason.
The software question
Booking software matters less here than anywhere else.
In a salon the booking platform is the business. In a tattoo studio it is a calendar and a card reader, because the artist runs their own book out of their own inbox. Nobody pays me to name any of these, and whatever you run, I wire in.
01Square Appointments+
02Acuity Scheduling+
03Booksy and Vagaro+
04Just an inbox+
Questions
What shop owners and artists ask before the deposit.
The longer version is free: the guide to tattoo studio websites goes page by page through organizing a portfolio by style rather than chronology, vetting a client before the deposit, and the few technical things that quietly decide whether Google ever shows you.
01How much does a tattoo studio website cost?+
02What should a tattoo inquiry form actually ask?+
03Can the site take a deposit?+
04Can each artist have their own portfolio and their own inquiry form?+
05How do you handle flash versus custom bookings?+
06Can the site show guest artists and convention dates?+
07Can you put our age and ID requirements on the site?+
08How long does it take, and do I own the site?+
A week from now, the shop is live.
Tell me how many artists, how much of the book is custom, and where your inquiries land now. That is enough for me to say what I would build and when I could start.
Written by Kyle Archuleta, founder of Yeti Design Co. · Last updated