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tattoo printer (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Why does this not exist yet?

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[-] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

There are some, but there are several reasons that you haven't seen them about.

  1. The people who spend the most on tattoos are doing so because they are art made by an artist. I'm not sure if you know many people in the scene, but these aren't the people getting flash tattoos at a random shop. They plan their tattoos, they pick their artists, and they spend many hours trusting another human to permanently alter their body.
  2. The most common type of printers in the world print on a 2D plane, even most 3D printers are printing on a nearly flat 2D plane one layer at a time. The human body is largely not a 2D plane.
  3. Human skin varies, ask any tattoo artist. You can't use the same pressure or the same type of needle on every person. And it takes people with experience to identify this. People who pay the most for their tattoos expect this expertise.

Those last two reasons are not impossible solves in any sense, but they do greatly increase the cost and complexity of a machine that can automatically tattoo a person without injuring them.

I'll also throw a number 4 in here. Speaking for the US, unless you've made a name for yourself tattoo artists are largely exploited here. They are mostly misclassified as independent contractors but then treated as employees. They are under valued and under paid.

So, how inexpensive can you make a machine to both purchase and maintain, while also being easy enough to undercut the already exploited labor in your average tattoo shop?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

I'll throw in another point, people are fucking terrible st staying still

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah, a tattoo printer would have to be at least a 5 axis robot. Technically, that's not a huge issue, and even pressure sensing or using machine vision to adjust the print aren't that difficult to do.

But even if it becomes a mass produced device, manufacturing costs for the robot part alone would be at least 3k-5k and then you will need a skilled operator to control that thing.

So you are replacing a minimum wage tattoo artist with an expensive robot and an even more expensive robot operator.

Doesn't really make sense.

The same thing holds true, btw, for pretty much all "humanoid robot applications". Minimum wage wokers are incredibly cheap, maintenance and setup costs (aka healthcare and education) are paid for by the employee, there's no vendor lock in and if you don't need them anymore you can just fire them whenever you want.

That's incredibly hard to compete against for a generalized robot.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

I am super proud of my plethora of bad tattoos, because they were all done freehand by the artist based on minimal input from me.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Just think of how much better it would have been if you could have drawn something yourself, or just picked some shit off the internet and then jammed a random body part into a machine.

this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
24 points (85.3% liked)

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