Would You Give Up Instagram for 90 Days?

Would you be willing to give up social media for ninety days? I don't mean deleting your accounts, throwing your phone into the local river bed or announcing to everybody that you're taking some inspirational digital detox.

Leave the accounts exactly where they are, let the old work sit there, answer a legitimate message if you need to, but stop feeding it for ninety days and see what happens when the tattoo artist quits doing the second job nobody remembers hiring them for.

No more trying to figure out what Instagram wants today, shooting another Reel after spending hours on a tattoo, editing video when you could be drawing, worrying about whether you posted at the wrong time or watching a piece you know is good get buried under whatever the machine decided people should see instead. Take all of the work involved in keeping a social media account alive and remove it from your day for three months, which probably sounds easy right up until you picture what might happen to your reach, engagement and that number sitting underneath your name.

If ninety days without feeding Instagram sounds dangerous to your tattoo career, I've got a considerably more uncomfortable question.

Are you a content creator or are you a fucking tattoo artist?

There's nothing wrong with being both, although I'd like to know when tattoo artists agreed they had to be. You can spend most of the day tattooing a bad ass piece on somebody, look at the finished work and be completely satisfied with what you did, but Instagram has another opinion on what happens next since apparently your professional work wasn't enough. Now you've got to turn that piece into content and hope whatever you make out of it travels far enough to justify doing it again tomorrow. At some point you have to ask yourself how much time you're willing to take away from getting better at your craft so you can get better at convincing Instagram to show people that you tattoo.

So, you decide you'll beat the game and go into a posting frenzy. When that doesn't produce what you expected, post even more, right? Turn one tattoo into a photograph, a Reel, a story and whatever else can be squeezed out of it, study what other accounts are doing, start thinking about hooks and retention and whether the music matters, and pretty soon the person who spent years learning how to tattoo is spending a ton amount of time learning how to make content about tattooing.

The casino has you exactly where it wants you, and when the reach starts drying up, most artists aren't going to blame the casino, they're going to blame themselves. I need to post more. I need better videos. I need more Reels. Fuck it, I'll double the content, triple it, quadruple it if that's what it takes to get discovered, except every additional hour spent trying to beat Instagram is another hour Instagram managed to get out of a tattoo artist who originally showed up there to advertise tattoos.

And here comes the know it all who thinks he has a grip on “the algorithm” after reading four sentences from an article that popped up on Facebook, which is even funnier when the article is actually an ad for some douchebag's marketing consulting business that Meta probably put in front of him after listening to whatever he'd been talking about all week. The ad throws him a few pointers to keep him reading and now this fucker has cracked the code, so by lunchtime he's throwing acronyms at everybody and giving advice like he invented the internet. We all know Al Gore invented the internet. Duh!

The house owns the machine, writes the rules and decides what gets distributed, and you showed up with tattoos in a place where tattoos are competing against nearly everything a human being can put on a screen. Your finished back piece can land between a celebrity doing something stupid and a dog wearing sunglasses, get a like from a person who thinks the tattoo is incredible, and five seconds later that person is gone without knowing your name, where you work or having any intention of getting tattooed in the first place.

There's another problem tattoo artists know pretty well if they look at who's paying attention to a lot of their shit. Other tattoo artists! That's not necessarily a bad thing as artists follow artists whose work they respect, they keep an eye on friends and people they've met in the industry, and tattooing would probably be a pretty shitty community if nobody gave a fuck what anybody else was doing. It just gets a little weird when all those people get counted together underneath a profile and the number starts being treated like there are that many potential clients standing on the other side of the screen.

I start calling some of them vanity followers, not as an insult to the people following you, but as an insult to the idea that the number itself tells you much about your business. An artist can have 50,000 followers and I'd still want to know how many of those people are looking to spend money on a tattoo rather than looking at tattoos for the same reason I can spend twenty minutes watching videos of people restoring old shit without having the slightest desire to restore anything myself.

None of this makes Instagram useless, which would be a ridiculous argument considering how many tattoo artists have used it to put their work in front of people who otherwise never would have known they existed. Instagram should absolutely be used as a marketing tool. The problem starts when the marketing tool becomes responsible for discovery too, since now the artist is depending on a platform built to keep people looking at everything to somehow locate the comparatively tiny number of people looking for exactly what that artist does.

Marketing………………...

Put the work there. Let people who already know you see what you're producing. Give past clients a reason to remember your name and future clients another place to look through your work. Use the enormous audience Instagram built instead of pretending it doesn't exist but asking the platform to become your primary discovery engine means accepting that tattooing will always be a tiny participant inside a much larger fight for attention.

You don't own that casino!

Instagram has been good for tattoo artists, no argument from me there, but somewhere along the way posting your work turned into having another job. You finish a tattoo and apparently the tattoo isn't enough anymore. Now you need to figure out what to do with it so Instagram will show your work to people who already raised their hand and followed you. Think about how crazy that is. You built the audience, they asked to see your work, and you still have to impress the guy who owns the room before he'll let you talk to them.

I keep going back to the artist who takes those extra hours and draws instead. That's a tattoo artist doing exactly what we supposedly want tattoo artists to do, getting better at tattooing, except the artist who spent the afternoon figuring out a Reel may get considerably more attention for the tattoo they already finished. I'm not shitting on the Reel either. Make one if you want, make a great one and have fun with it. I just don't want to pretend that any of that tells me who I should trust with a needle.

Our pitch at Inker is pretty straightforward. We're the largest tattoo artist directory and we tell artists to come there to get discovered. That's our model, and “get discovered” isn't some lame marketing line we slapped on the website. We're dedicated to making that happen, which also means driving consumer traffic into Inker so there are actually people there doing the discovering. And these aren't people opening an app to watch comedy skits, see two cousins get married, or kill twenty minutes looking at whatever other bullshit gets thrown into a social media feed. They came to Inker to check out tattoo artists and their work.

If a collector is looking for Japanese style work, put the artists doing that work in front of them. I don't care if one has 70,000 Instagram followers and another has 2,700. Show me the portfolios and let the tattoos fight it out. The artist with 2,700 followers might absolutely smoke the artist with 70,000, and for the first time those follower counts don't have to enter the conversation at all. The collector is already there, already looking, and now the artist gets a chance to be discovered for the thing they do.

They might find an artist thirty miles away or might see work good enough to make a plane ticket look cheap. Let them figure that shit out after we introduce them to the artist. Our job is making the introduction possible in the first place, especially for the artist doing incredible work who hasn't figured out how to turn every tattoo into something Instagram wants to push around.

Instagram can still be valuable and tattoo artists should get everything they can out of it, but telling artists they need to become better at Instagram starts sounding pretty out there.

Inker is the “largest tattoo artist directory.” “Get Discovered” is right there in the pitch, and we're driving consumer traffic into the site to put a “fuckton” more weight behind those two cores. The people coming in are there to check out tattoo artists and their work, period.

Put serious consumer traffic into a directory with that many tattoo artists and there's no telling who people are going to uncover once they start digging around. There are incredible artists working in shops all over the country that most tattoo collectors have never heard of, and some of them are probably sitting a few miles away from people who would gladly hand them money if the two knew each other existed. Others could be across the country producing work good enough to change where the next vacation gets booked. None of those artists should have to become content machines first so their work gets a chance to travel farther than their own neighborhood or existing following.

The scale of Inker gives discovery room to get pretty wild once enough consumers are moving through it, since the largest tattoo artist directory becomes a very different animal when huge numbers of people are using it to hunt for artists. A collector can come in knowing three names and leave knowing thirty, run across an artist with a portfolio that completely screws up whatever plans they had before opening the site, or discover work coming out of some shop they never would have searched for in a city that wasn't even on their radar. The artist doesn't need to be funny, chase trends or spend half the day trying to decode what Meta wants from them; they need to be good at tattooing and have their work where people interested in tattoos can find it.

There's something beyond enormous sitting inside “Get Discovered” when you look at it that way, especially when Inker will keep packing the directory with artists at the same time consumer traffic keeps growing around them. At that size, discovery doesn't have to belong mainly to the artists who already figured out how to get discovered somewhere else first, and the tattoo artist nobody knows today can end up on a collector's screen for the best possible reason: the collector came looking for tattoos and the work was bad ass!

So, I'm leaving the ninety-day challenge right where I started it, except now I'll make it a little more obnoxious. Take every hour you would normally spend trying to keep Instagram interested in you for the next ninety days and give those hours back to your tattooing, whether you draw more, experiment with something you haven't had time to mess with. Work on designs sitting half-finished somewhere or use the time however you want, as long as Instagram doesn't get it.

You don't have to disappear from the platform or do anything stupid to your business, just stop treating the algorithm like it deserves a piece of every tattoo you make and see what happens when all that time belongs to you again.

And if you're worried Instagram might forget about you during the experiment, Inker has a search bar.

J Gekko
Staff Writer, Inker