People and Artist
This one is Inksquad. I am CTO. I still open Xcode in the same week I send invoices.
It is two products. Not one app wearing two outfits. An enthusiast and a tattooer do not need the same screen. When you force that, you get a booking widget with a stencil buried in settings. I did not want that.
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 someone who has a tattoo in their head and needs to get it out of the group chat.
You make a private project. Description. Style. Where it sits on the body. Size. References you actually like, instead of thirty screenshots of other people’s work with no notes. You can generate visuals with AI if that helps you see it. When the idea is ready, you share a project with an artist, not a folder of files named IMG_4032.
It is preparation. I do not want a calendar product pretending to be a studio.
The site is public. It works. There is an internal beta update coming. 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. App Store, Inksquad Srl, currently $9.99 plus in-app credits. Version 4.2.3 when I last looked. The store said there were not enough ratings to display a star average, so I will not invent one.
This is the one I care about in a session.
You import a sketch from Procreate, Photoshop, or Illustrator. The stencil path is preprocess, edge detection, VTracer, then PencilKit layers you can still edit. If the stencil is wrong, you fix the layer. You keep the drawing.
Ink matching is 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. 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. Voice, because your hands are not free. I have watched people try to tap a 16-pixel control with nitrile on. The session stalls. 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. It does not hold the machine. If a page ever sounded like it did, that page was wrong.
Underneath
Turborepo. Supabase: Postgres, RLS, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions. The Vercel AI SDK talking to OpenAI, Grok, Replicate, Vertex. A Next.js admin. A Payload CMS site next to the apps.
That is the floor the two products stand on, so an idea in People can become something an artist can open on an iPad.
I ship native apps. Forty-four points is what a thumb wants. Artist has to survive a session. Smart Squad pays the rent. Inksquad is why I still open the iPad after the client work.
Try Artist in a studio if you only try one. People is how a client shows up with more than a screenshot.