Around 2 years ago, Oz and I came up with a plan to build a basic web app that would collate all our favourite tattoos and tattoo artists. With obstacles in life, client work, and realistically a little laziness, everything moved at a snails’s pace.
As we entered 2018, we figured we should finally commit to launching this thing. After putting the hours in these past few months, we’re hitting the launch button for our V1.
Why did we make Outline? What is it exactly?
We figured we’d love to use a platform built around the brilliant, constantly updating content of Instagram, but properly curated, leaving only the best work… all of which is searchable with proper style categorisation, locations, and artist profiles.
Instagram really has developed into the portfolio platform of the modern tattoo artist. It’s the best platform out there for sharing work and building an audience.
Where Instagram fails is within discovery (both for people looking for a new tattoo, and artists themselves). It’s not built specifically for tattoos and artists, so will naturally have limitations in this area. You can hack a basic style search together using hashtags, but results are mixed. Location search is almost impossible, along with keyword/subject browsing.
All of this is what Outline improves and fixes.
If you create an account, you can also easily save your favourite tattoos, ideal for collating examples for your next tattoo artist (which you may also find on Outline!).
We’ve got plans to add plenty more to Outline, whether it’s more discovery services or tools for artists. Right now however, we’re just looking to focus on growing our pool of content and making small but significant tweaks to the search tool. Literally every single artist (currently around 500) has been curated by hand. While we will look to improve the quality of the automated tools we have running on all our tattoos, ultimately our quality will always come through human curated content, which we’ll have far more time to dedicate towards now Outline’s live. 🎉
Cities we’ve focused on thus far
(with most emphasis on the top of the list)
- London
- Barcelona
- Berlin
- Paris
- New York
- San Francisco
- Leeds
- Birmingham
- Manchester
- Edinburgh
This list will quickly grow, and you may still find results from other places in the world (the best tattoo artists travel and guest a LOT). Being UK based, we do want to keep half our focus on growing the list of UK cities, but will constantly add to the international pool also.
If you have ANY thoughts — whether you’ve spotted a bug, or just an awesome idea for something we could add, please do let us know, either via Twitter or email (hello@outline.wtf).
x
Jack
