About a year ago I decided to start looking for an artist to work with for a sleeve I want to get done. The issue is, I want to get a style that isn't exactly common. I initially started to look in the usual routes. Instagram, facebook, google, etc. And I ran into the same issue each time. Fake accounts, reposters, various top 10 lists, and artists that had nothing to do with what I was looking for. Who would have thought searching for "tattoo artists near me" would yield such useless results.
So I thought there had to be a better way right? There had to be someone somewhere that had compiled a list of artists to make this process easier. Someone that had collected and organized a list of tattoo artists to eliminate the frustrations of finding an artist, and to make artists more visible to potential customers without having to deal with weird algorithms and busted advertisements. And there was!
There were a few different places that had lists of artists. Unfortunately most of them were incomplete and had very few artists listed at all. In some cases there were fewer artists listed than what would show up on the first page on instagram results. I thought this was odd and so I started poking around and as best I can tell all of these lists require artists to sign up themselves. So if an artist either doesn't know about the site, or doesn't think it's worth the time or effort then they just won't be included.
This barrier of entry is why cities of millions would have only a handful of artists listed across many lists in some cases. And most of the artists I saw were the same. Clearly artists that had taken the time to sign up on each list themselves. Which in itself isn't a bad thing at all, but it doesn't help the average tattoo enjoyer to see everything out there.
So I started gathering a list of artists myself. I wanted to make a list that was as complete as possible so I set about creating tools to help with gathering information and reviewing artists to make sure they were real before adding them to the tattoo artist list. At first it was just for my own use to make the process of finding an artist for specific styles in my area a bit easier. But as the list grew larger I built a simple UI to let friends and family search it as well. As the list approached a thousand artists however I decided that I should probably polish the site and open it to the public. After all if I'm going to do all this work I might as well let others benefit from it as well. And that leads us to the site you see now!
I will keep this short since it's the first blog. But I will go into more depth both on the design and technical side of the project in future posts. Look forward to it!
Until next time, Be Good.