“Is this normal?”

Over the years a lot of women have asked me about things other artists did during their sessions — somewhere else, in someone else’s chair — that they weren’t okay with, but weren’t sure whether it was just standard.

Never about the tattoo. About how they were treated while they got it.

They were asking me because I was the only other tattoo artist they knew well enough to ask. There was nowhere else to check.
Nico — tattoo artist, Bad Vibes Body Art, Ottawa

Join the waitlist

The part nobody writes down

Not knowing is the problem.

Almost none of it is dramatic. You are three hours into a session, something feels off, and you have no way to tell whether it is normal or not. You can’t ask the person doing it. So you sit there and decide on your own, with nothing to go on.

Reviews tell you whether the linework is clean. Nothing told you what the six hours were like.

What it is

Read the session, not just the art.

Look an artist up and see what previous clients said about the appointment itself. The same questions for every artist, so the answers actually compare.

Did you feel safe and respected?
Were your boundaries honoured?
Was the studio clean?
Was pricing clear?
Did you feel pressured at any point?
Would you book with them again?

How you find them

You choose first. Always.

Tell Inkling what you actually need from a tattoo artist. Clean and hygienic, a private room, clear about pricing, whatever matters to you. Mark each one Must or Prefer. Anything you mark Must is a filter, not a wish: you are never shown an artist who does not meet it. The ones you Prefer come first among the artists who do.

Then you browse and swipe, the way you would expect. Here is the part that is different: an artist is never shown a list of clients. They only ever see the people who already swiped yes on them, and then they decide whether they want the work. There is no directory of women for anyone to scroll through, because there is no version of that which ends well.

If you both say yes, you can talk. Nobody can reach you before that.

What an artist promises

A claim you can be held to.

Artists say what they run. Smoke-free, a private room, a support person welcome, clear about pricing, breaks on long sessions. Those are the same things you filter on, so they are not decoration: if an artist says it, that is the reason you were shown them at all.

So the reviews ask about exactly those things afterwards. Not whether the tattoo looked good, but whether the promise held. An artist keeps the claim and it becomes something you can see was kept, over and over, by people who were actually there. Break it and that shows too.

Anyone can list a standard. Keeping it is the part that counts, and it is the part we publish.

Why the reviews are worth reading

Every review is tied to a real appointment.

A depositpaid through Inkling
A session datethat actually happened
A photoof the finished tattoo

No review without all three.

That is what makes it hard to fake in either direction. Nobody can invent a session that never happened, and nobody can buy a wall of reviews they didn’t earn.

Identity is checked by a third party. Inkling never sees or stores the document. We keep only a ✓.

The part that matters most

Women, men and enby, side by side.

One blended score lets an artist who is fine with men and not fine with women look fine. So Inkling never blends them. Women’s answers, men’s answers and enby answers are reported in three separate columns. You choose how you are counted when you sign up: woman, man, or non-binary.

How an artist appears in the app. Example figures.

Enby (non-binary) answers get their own column on exactly the same terms, and every group needs the same number of reviews before it appears. Nobody is folded into somebody else’s figure to make a column look fuller.

No group is shown until at least five people in it have reviewed that artist. With two or three, an artist can usually work out who wrote which review, and the whole point is that you can answer honestly without that. Below five your answers still count in every overall figure. They just are not put in a column that could point at you.

Side by side, a gap has nowhere to hide.

Before an artist is listed

A person reads the packet.

Artists are verified before clients can see them. Bloodborne pathogen certificate, licence or public health permit, studio photos, written policies — assembled by the artist, and read by a human being rather than a checkbox. Everyone listed next to you cleared the same bar.

If it goes wrong anyway

Part of what we make goes into a removal fund.

To book, you pay your artist a deposit through Inkling and we keep a fee from it. Separately, artists pay to be listed here, and a portion of what they pay goes into a fund that helps pay for laser removal or a cover-up after a session that went badly. It builds whether or not anyone booked that month. You see any amount you are charged before you pay it, and the fund's ledger is public.

It is money set aside, not money owed. There is no application, nobody is entitled to it, and asking about it can never change a review you left.

What it is not

This is not a vetting authority.

Inkling cannot guarantee anyone’s safety and cannot promise how anyone will behave. A clean record is not a promise about tomorrow. It only knows what people chose to report, which is never everything.

It is information to decide with. Not permission to stop paying attention.

See it