Inksquad People and Inksquad Artist
This one is Inksquad, where I am CTO. I still open Xcode in the same week I send invoices.
I built two products because the people using them are doing different jobs. Someone who has a tattoo in their head needs a place to get the idea out of a group chat: a description, a style, a placement, references they actually like. A tattooer in a session needs a stencil they can still edit, bottles that exist in a catalog, and controls they can hit with nitrile on. If you put both of those jobs on one screen, the booking widget wins and the stencil ends up in settings. I wanted each job to have its own product, with a shared floor underneath so an idea can travel from one to the other.
The card at the top is the live Open Graph image from inksquad.com. Marketing made a QR code and a line I would not write in this journal. The products underneath it are the part I will stand next to.
People
web.inksquad.com is for the person with the idea. You make a private project and fill in the description, the style, where it sits on the body, and the size. You add references you actually like, instead of thirty screenshots of other people’s work with no notes. If it helps you see the thing, you can generate visuals with AI. When the idea is ready, you share the project with an artist, rather than a folder of files named IMG_4032.
People stops at the prepared project. Booking and the session live elsewhere. I wanted a tool for getting the idea clear before anyone sits in a chair. The site is public and it works. There is an internal beta update coming, so if you land there and something is rough, that is because it is still being built in the open.
Artist
artist.inksquad.com is the iPad app on the App Store, published by Inksquad Srl, currently $9.99 plus in-app credits. This is the one I care about during a session.
You import a sketch from Procreate, Photoshop, or Illustrator. The stencil path runs preprocess, edge detection, and VTracer, then lands in PencilKit layers you can still edit. If the stencil is wrong, you fix the layer and keep the drawing.
Ink matching uses CIE94 and CIEDE2000 against more than four hundred real catalogs, including sets that have to be legal in the EU. In Europe you cannot treat ink like a hex code from a moodboard. You drop markers on the image, and the catalog answers with bottles that exist. Matrix and Color Wheel are for palettes and blending, primaries plus black and white, the boring color work that actually happens at a bench.
Live mode is the gloves test: zoom, markers, stencil layers, a timer, switching views, and voice, because your hands are not free. The app is offline-capable because a studio is a bad place to discover you needed a spinner. Wi-Fi in a shop is a rumor.
AI can help generate a concept or clean a reference, and the session still belongs to the artist.
Why they share a platform
An idea in People should become something an artist can open on an iPad. That is why the two products stand on the same floor, so a project can move without being rebuilt as a pile of files.
If you only try one, try Artist in a studio. People is how a client shows up with more than a screenshot.