What a Custom Tattoo Costs, and Why
Price is the question everyone wants answered first and almost nobody asks directly. It arrives sideways — “roughly, what would something like this run?” — usually attached to a photo and a hope.
I would rather just explain the whole structure. Here is what a custom tattoo costs, what you are paying for, and why the number is built the way it is.
The short version
A full session with me is $1,500. It runs six to seven hours and starts at 11:00 AM. A $300 deposit holds the date, is non-refundable, and comes off the final price — so a single-session piece costs $1,500 total, of which $300 is paid up front.
Larger work takes more than one session. Nothing else is hidden in there.
Why by the session and not by the hour
Hourly pricing sounds fairer than it is. It quietly punishes the artist for working efficiently and punishes you for having a complicated tattoo, and it turns the entire day into a meter running in the corner of the room.
More to the point, it puts you and me on opposite sides of the same decision. Under an hourly rate, every extra pass to deepen a shadow costs you more money — so you start watching the clock, and I start feeling the pressure to call something finished when it is not. That is a bad way to make a permanent object.
A flat session removes the negotiation entirely. The day costs what it costs. If a section needs another hour of rendering to sit right, it gets it, and neither of us has to have a conversation about money in the middle of the work.
What you are actually paying for
The tattoo takes six to seven hours. The job does not.
Drawing. A custom piece is designed for you: your reference material, your anatomy, the specific curve of the arm or ribs it has to wrap around. That is typically several hours of work before you sit down, plus revisions after you see it. None of it is billed separately — it is inside the session price.
The consultation and the planning. Deciding what the piece actually is, what to cut, how big it needs to be to survive the next decade, where it sits so it reads well when you move.
The day itself. Six or seven hours of continuous focus. One client. I do not run parallel appointments, which is why the calendar moves slowly and why the wait is usually two to four weeks.
The overhead you never see. Chair rental, single-use needles and tubes, cartridges, ink, disposables, barriers, licensing, insurance, and the equipment that gets replaced on schedule rather than when it fails.
The years behind the hand. I have been tattooing since 2015. You are paying for the mistakes I made on my own time so that they do not happen on your skin.
If you want to see how the whole engagement runs from first message to healed piece, the process page walks through it step by step.
What the deposit is for
The $300 deposit is the part people push back on most, so here is the reasoning without spin.
When I book you, I take a full day off the calendar and I spend the days before it drawing your piece. If you cancel the night before, that day cannot be resold — nobody books a six-hour custom session on twelve hours’ notice — and the drawing has nowhere to go. It was made for your ribs.
The deposit means that risk is shared instead of sitting entirely on one side. It is non-refundable for exactly that reason: a refundable deposit does not do anything a promise does not already do.
It is not an extra fee. It comes off the final price. If your piece is one session, you pay $300 to book and $1,200 on the day.
It also does not come first. A free consultation happens before any money changes hands — we agree on what the piece is, and only then does the deposit go out by invoice to hold the date. Nobody pays me to find out whether their idea works.
Reschedule with at least 24 hours’ notice and the deposit moves with you. Less than that, or a no-show, and it is forfeited — including for illness or travel, which is the part people find harsh until they have had a full studio day evaporate at 9 PM the night before. The exact terms are in booking info, and I would rather you read them before you pay than after.
What actually moves the number
For work that runs beyond a single session, these are the variables that decide how many sessions it takes:
Size, but less than you think. A big, bold piece can be faster than a small, dense one. Ten square inches of tightly packed micro-detail takes longer than a forearm of confident structure.
Detail density. Every element you add costs time twice — once to draw it and once to render it. This is also where the honest conversation about longevity happens, because past a certain density the detail will not survive the decade anyway. Cutting elements often makes a tattoo both cheaper and better, which is a rare combination.
Placement. Ribs, sternum, inner arm, knees, hands and feet are slower. The skin behaves differently, it moves more, and it hurts more, which means more breaks. Outer arms, thighs and calves are the friendly territory.
Colour versus black and grey. Colour generally takes longer: more passes, more blending, more layering to get saturation that will still be there in five years. It is not a surcharge, it is time. I cover how the two age differently in the styles guide.
Cover-ups. A cover-up is not a normal tattoo. It has to be designed around something that already exists, usually darker and larger than the piece you wanted, and sometimes it needs a few laser sessions first to open up options. There is a dedicated page on cover-ups because it is its own problem.
Your skin and your day. Skin tone, texture, scarring and how well you sit all affect how much ground gets covered. Someone who has slept and eaten gets more done than someone who arrived on four hours of sleep and an empty stomach.
Why I will not quote you from a photo
People ask for a number off a screenshot, and I understand why. But a real quote requires knowing where it goes on your body, how big it actually is on you, what it has to work around, and what you are willing to cut.
Any number given before that is either padded to cover the unknowns or too low to survive contact with reality — and a quote that has to be revised upward later is worse than no quote at all. What I can tell you immediately is whether your idea is one session or several, and that is usually the answer you actually needed.
On cheaper quotes
You will find lower prices in this city. Some of them are legitimate: artists earlier in their careers, pricing honestly for where they are, doing good work. Hiring one is a completely reasonable decision, especially for simpler pieces.
What is worth understanding is the arithmetic behind a price that is dramatically lower than everyone else’s. Six or seven hours is six or seven hours. If someone is charging a fraction of it, the time has to come from somewhere: less drawing, less rendering, more clients per day, cheaper materials, or a session that ends when the clock says so rather than when the work says so.
The comparison that matters is not this artist against that one. It is the tattoo you keep against the tattoo you eventually pay to have covered or removed — and removal reliably costs several times the original, spread over a year of appointments.
What to budget
If you are planning a custom piece with me, budget in sessions. One session, $1,500. A half sleeve is usually two to three. A full sleeve or a back piece is a project measured in sessions across months, and we plan it together rather than discovering it as we go.
The calendar is the flexible part: sessions can be spaced out to fit what you can do. Most people book the next one when they are ready rather than committing to the whole run up front.
If you have a specific idea and want to know how many sessions it would take, send it through booking info with a photo of the placement — that is enough for a real answer. If you are still deciding whether my work is what you want, start with the gallery.