Strolling down the expo floor at TechCrunch Disrupt, Joe Sebok did a double-take.
“Wait,” said Sebok, a professional poker player, stopping in his tracks. “Are you motherfuckers getting tattoos?!”
A company called Tattd was indeed offering free tattoos all three days of the conference, and disbelief has been a common first reaction from attendees who stumbled upon its booth at the startup convention, which is happening this week at Moscone West.
“Everyone is like, ‘Are they real, permanent tattoos?’ because it’s such an odd match, tattooing at a tech event,” said Tattd founder Laura Schaak. “But the second one is usually, ‘Tell me more.’”
Amid a bustling marketplace of funding-hungry founders luring passersby into pitch sessions with safer giveaways like merch, snacks, and games, the pop-up tattoo parlor drew crowds of agog onlookers plus a waitlist of more than 100 people.
So who gets a tattoo at a tech convention? Mostly, people who already have a lot of tattoos. Schaak said when people walk by with some ink poking out from under their sleeves, it’s a good bet they’ll stop at the booth to chat or add their name to the waitlist. All the commotion at Tattd’s booth even attracted a number of the convention's security guards, not because Tattd doesn’t have its permits (it does, Schaak said), but because they’re tatted up, too.
However, one first-timer did get on the table today to get his two daughters’ names tattooed on his forearm. Afterwards, I asked him how he felt. He responded, “I need a cigarette!”
“Having the live tattoos here is bringing us so much attention,” Schaak said. “It’s a sexy industry. People want to see it. People want to be a part of it, even if they don’t have tattoos.”
Tattd’s product is a marketplace app that connects tattoo artists and clients. Based in Brooklyn, it has been live in New York and Los Angeles since it launched in 2022. Since then, 14,000 clients and 900 artists have joined the platform, Schaak said.
Besides generating some word-of-mouth buzz in a target market, Schaak said she came to Disrupt this week to pitch Tattd and its new AI integrations to the many investors in attendance.
“There’s going to be gen AI to actually create the tattoo sketch for you,” Schaak said. “It’s hard to communicate to an artist exactly what you want, so you can create the perfect sketch and then we can reverse-search that.”
Like many apps before it, there are also plans to integrate a ChatGPT chatbot into the platform.
At this point in the AI boom, image generators and search engines are, for better or worse, two of the less controversial forms of the technology. The fact that an exhibit so exciting was advertising a product so normal proved confusing to several passersby.
“So an AI does the tattooing?” someone asked as they paused in front of the booth.
The tattoo artist looked up from cleaning her station and smirked. “Yeah, I’m AI.”
The artist — who (and I hate that I’m obliged to tell you this) is a real, human person — is Renette Hammer, the owner of the Hayes Valley tattoo shop Mirage Tattoo. She brought several sheets of fineline flash tattoos for Disrupt customers to choose from. Designs included cheetahs with hearts for spots, a cowgirl smoking a cigarette, a vintage car on a postage stamp, dice with the letters L-U-C-K, a bullet, and a moon face with long eyelashes and hearts on its cheeks, to name a few.
Just for the Disrupt pop-up, Hammer had also included a few techier flashes: An escape key, a pixelated cursor, and the TechCrunch logo.
Tattd’s in-person tattoo services can dole out about ten tattoos in a day. Yesterday, two people got the cursor design. So far, no one has signed up to get the TechCrunch logo, not even the handful of TechCrunch employees who have gotten inked this week.
“Listen, I love who I work with. Love my job. But I’m not that committed to the brand,” laughed Theresa Loconsolo, a TechCrunch podcast producer, as Hammer’s assistant cleaned her arm with a disinfectant wipe. (She was getting the moon face design.)
“It’s for the plot,” said her colleague Dominic-Madori Davis, who had her phone out, waiting to record the moment.
Frankie Duarte, on the other hand, is that committed to the brand: The IT operations manager for Airbnb got a tiny Airbnb logo on her inner arm.
“I’ve been there for 12 years. I grew up with it,” Duarte said, “When I joined Airbnb, I didn’t have kids. Now I have two kids, but I consider Airbnb my first baby. No matter how I expand my career, it’ll always be my first baby.”
Schaak said Tattd’s live studios are always popular, but this environment is a first for their team. It’s their first time at Disrupt; they usually pop up at “more cultural” events like music festivals and sports games. But considering the success of this week’s booth and the investor-laden clientele Schaak said this won’t be their last.
“Technology and tattoos is a great marriage and a big opportunity,” she said.
