20/06/2026
What are your thoughts on tattoo artists using AI?
As a collective here at Acid Jungle, we're just not into it.
Since we are seeing more and more artists posting tattoos clearly designed using AI, studios using it to make social media posts, and conventions advertising with AI generated posters, we wanted to make our stance clear.
None of the artists here use AI to create tattoo designs. We make our own posts and posters. We don't even knowingly use AI references for our designs, put simply, there's just no need. We are all artists, and artists create art. AI not only uses obscene amounts of water (we are living in an age of global water bankruptcy rn) but it also puts money in the pockets of the kind of people who we really aren't keen to support. The owner of OpenAI is one of Trump's biggest financial donors, as well as the company holding several military contracts and providing support to ICE in the US. And that's just scratching the surface.
We don't really like it when clients bring us AI images as references either - I mean, we get it: if you don't have artistic the skills to put together a concept for your artist and struggle to describe visual imagery then AI can seem like an easy solution, but please bear in mind that AI does not actually understand the art of tattooing and does not take things like size, detail, body contours or longevity of design into consideration, so if you do send an AI reference, the final design will be significantly different. Also, put a bit more faith in your tattooer - it's literally half of our job to take your half baked ideas and use them to create something personal for you. You can bring us 3 words, a fridge magnet, or a stick figure diagram, and we can build your tattoo from there. In fact, we really, really love creating custom pieces with our clients, and AI is stripping the joy out of that - and we honestly do this job for the love of it.
Thank you for coming to our TED talk.
I shall now open the floor for questions 🙃
