How to price custom tattoo work

Pricing custom work is where most artists undercharge. Not because they do not know what the work is worth, but because the price gets decided in a DM at eleven at night, from a screenshot and the words "how much for something like this, but smaller?"

A price has to pay for the hours in the chair, the hours at the drawing desk that nobody sees, the rent and the needles, and the tax on all of it. Here is how to work out a number that does, and how to quote it so it sticks.

Start with the least you can charge

Before you think about what other artists charge, work out what an hour of your time has to cover. Add up a month of costs, add what you need to pay yourself, and divide by the hours you actually tattoo.

The hours are the part people get wrong. Five days a week is not forty hours of tattooing. Setting up, breaking down, consultations, drawing, messages and the books all come out of the week. If you tattoo for sixty hours a month, that £4,050 needs £67.50 an hour just to break even on the life you planned. Every hour you spend drawing for free, or every sitting that runs long at the old price, comes off it.

Our free hourly rate calculator does this sum with your own figures.

This is a floor, not a price. What you charge above it depends on your experience, your style and how quickly your books fill. But if your price is under this number, no amount of being busy will fix it. Put aside for tax from what is left, too: our guide to Self Assessment for tattoo artists has a rule of thumb for how much.

Hourly, day rate or by the piece?

There are three common ways to price, and many artists use all three for different jobs.

By the hour is fair to you when a piece is hard to predict. The trouble is that the client does not know what they will pay until you put the machine down, and some clients watch the clock rather than the tattoo. If you charge hourly, give an estimate of the hours in writing and say what happens if it runs over.

By the piece is what most clients want: one number, agreed before they book. It suits anything you can size up with confidence: flash, small and medium custom work, and pieces like ones you have done before. The risk sits with you, so estimate the time honestly and price from your hourly floor, not from what feels polite.

A day rate suits big work: sleeves, back pieces, anything over several full sittings. The client knows what each day costs, you know the day is paid for, and nobody argues over whether a session ran to five hours or six.

For most UK artists an hourly rate lands somewhere between about £80 and £150, higher in London and for artists with long waiting lists, and a day rate is usually a little less than eight times the hourly rate as a reward for booking the whole day. Your own floor matters more than either number.

Set a minimum

Every tattoo, however small, needs a sterile setup, a stencil, a clean-down and a slot in your diary. A minimum charge, often £60 to £100, makes sure a tiny piece still pays for all that. Put it on your page and in your saved replies, so "how much for a small heart on my wrist?" is answered before it is asked.

What moves a price up or down

Two pieces the same size can take very different amounts of time. The usual things that change a price are:

• Size. Ask for it in centimetres. "Small" means something different to everybody.
• Placement. Ribs, hands, feet, necks and the inside of the elbow are slower and harder to work on than a forearm or a calf.
• Detail and colour. Fine detail, realism and packed colour take longer than bold lines and open space.
• Cover-ups and reworks. You are designing around somebody else's work, and it almost always takes longer than a fresh piece.
• Drawing time. A design built from scratch from four references is not the same job as tidying up a drawing the client brought in.

Price the time each of these adds, rather than adding a vague premium. It is easier to explain, too: "hands are slower to tattoo, so this is priced as three hours rather than two" is a sentence a client understands.

Charge for the drawing

The hours at the drawing desk are real work, and they are the hours most often given away. The usual ways to cover them are:

• Build them into the price. The simplest, and what most clients expect.
• Let the deposit cover them. A deposit taken before you start drawing pays for the drawing if the client disappears. Our guide to how much a tattoo deposit should be covers the amounts.
• Charge for heavy revisions. One or two rounds of changes are part of the job. A fifth redraw, or a completely different idea, is a new drawing.

Whatever you choose, do not send a finished design before the deposit is paid. A design sent for free is a design somebody else can tattoo.

Quoting from a DM

Most bad quotes start with not enough information. Before you give a number, ask for:

• a photo of the placement, and the size in centimetres
• the references, and what they like about each one
• black and grey or colour
• whether it covers or sits next to an existing tattoo
• their budget, if they have one, and roughly when they want it done

Then quote one price, or a tight range with what would move it ("£350, or £400 if we add the background"), in writing. Give the quote an end date, too. A price sent in March should not come back to bind you in November, after your rates have gone up.

Raising your prices

If your books fill within hours of opening, or you are booked months ahead, your price is too low. Raise it for new bookings, tell people a few weeks before it changes, and honour any quote you have already sent until its end date. Regulars on a long project are usually kept on the old rate until it is finished; that is a courtesy, not a rule.

It also pays to be consistent. If you quote a palm-sized forearm piece at £180 one week and £260 the next, it will get noticed. Before quoting, look back at what you charged for work like it.

How Chairtime handles it

Your enquiry form asks for the placement, size, budget, reference images and rough dates, plus any questions of your own, so the enquiry arrives with most of what you need to price it. You reply in the same thread, send design drafts back and forth, and send a quote with the price, the deposit, how long each sitting takes, the number of sittings and a date it is valid until. The deposit is filled in from your booking rules. The client accepts, picks a time from your availability and pays the deposit, and the booking lands in your calendar.

With the AI assistant add-on on Membership, every new enquiry arrives with a suggested reply and a suggested price, worked out from your own past quotes and with its reasoning shown, for example "three comparable forearm pieces quoted £200–£240 in the last year, all accepted". If nothing comparable has been quoted, or the enquiry is too vague, it leaves the price blank rather than guessing. It never sends anything: you check it, change what you like and press send yourself.

Quotes, deposits and the inbox are all on the free plan: nothing a month, and a flat £1 a booking.