The internet, social media in particular, has proven to be an excellent place for tattoo artists to promote themselves. The rise of social networking sites, like Instagram and Facebook , along with wide-spread smartphone use has provided tattoo artists with a way to easily show off their recent work. Here artists can build up a following of people interested in their work, and when the person is ready to make an investment (especially after seeing the artist’s badassery for a period of time), it’s likely they’re going to opt to use that artist.
Social media helps an artist build their name; but with every perk of these websites, there’s a downside. For a tattoo artist, that most common problem? People who aren’t crediting tattoo artists.
Big Sites Craving Content, Not Crediting Artists
Bigger websites have been mining content from social media sites (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) for years now. If they have a blog to put together about tattoos, they want to find and reproduce the content quickly; the end result is that the artist is rarely credited. This may be because the tattoo was re-posted on a blog or social media network and the artist who did it wasn’t acknowledged. Rather than digging deeper, they grab the image because it meets the theme and proceed.
It would seem easy enough to save an image with the artist name in the filename when you pull content from a tattoo artist’s social media page, but that doesn’t always happen.
Tips For Tattoo Artists To Prevent Content Theft
- Watermark your photos. Make sure your watermark is legible and if possible, include your website.
- Ask your clients to credit you when they post or submit pictures of their tattoo. Most people don’t think about how the content they post and submit places is re-used. You can go as far as to shoot them a text with their tattoo and the watermark and encourage them to use that image when submitting their tattoo to other websites.
Tattooists Presenting Other Tattooist’s Work as Their Own
The biomechanical foot tattoo Joel was trying to pass of as his own is actually by Karl Berringer at True North Tattoo in Wadsworth, OH.
We’ve had tattoo artists apply for features using the work of others or that have the work of other tattoo artists on their page without crediting the artist (and not correcting the commenters). Sort of gives the implication they did the tattoo, no?
The most unfortunate thing about this situation is the number of people who get tattoos under false pretenses. The second, and undeniably insulting part, is calling yourself an artist and then using someone else’s work as your own. And then there’s the messy miscredited work as a result. Yeah, it’s a badass tattoo. Now let’s say, Inked Magazine picks it up and credits the wrong artist. Who’s screwed?
Inspiration or Imitation?
A photo posted by Andrés Acosta (@acostattoo) on
Ah, the gray area of tattooing and art. How many times does a client come in and want the artwork of another tattooists? Where’s the line between completely ripping the original concept off and being inspired by the style and making it your own?
For What It’s Worth
At Perfect Tattoo, we pride ourselves with delivering our users accurate, quality content. We enjoy promoting *perfect* artists because we recognize tattooing as an art. The days of scratcher tattoos need to end and the internet (and more generally, media) will play a critical role in showing what real tattooing is.
As you can imagine, we spend a lot of time looking for content. We found it irritating how difficult it can be to find a great tattoo and know which artist did it. We really hated having to put “unknown” under a badass tattoo. So we stopped. We don’t put up tattoos if we can’t attribute them to an artist. When we have content submitted without artist credit, we do not share it. We implore other websites to follow in our footsteps and work towards crediting tattooists for the fine artwork they do.
