The Work · Real Photography
The Tattoo
Gallery.
Photography from the bench — sessions in progress, jars in working studios, and ink at different points in the healing window. Everything here is our own or shared with permission. Nothing is stock, and nothing is a before-and-after we cannot stand behind.
In the studio
Where it actually gets used.
The jar spends most of its life on a bench rather than in a bathroom cabinet, which is the reason the formula has to work as a session glide and as take-home aftercare. Shops that want it on their own bench can apply for wholesale.
Reading a heal
What healing actually looks like.
Photographs of tattoos are misleading more often than they are useful, because a tattoo looks materially different on day two, day six and day twenty-one — and the middle stretch is the part that makes people panic. Around day four to seven you get thin dark flakes matching the ink colour. Around week two the whole piece can go cloudy and flat as new skin forms over the top. Both are normal, and neither means the tattoo is ruined.
What is not normal: heat coming off the tattoo, redness spreading outward rather than settling, weeping that starts again days after it stopped, or a fever. That is a doctor, not a cream. The scabbing guide and the itching guide go through the difference in detail, and the 14-day schedule covers what to do on each day.
Send yours
We would rather show real heals than stock photos.
If you healed a piece with InkLube and you are happy with how it settled, send us the photo and we will add it here with credit to you and to the artist. Day-one and fully-healed shots of the same tattoo are the most useful thing anyone can contribute, because that pairing is what almost nobody publishes honestly.
Email it to the customer address on the contact page with the artist’s name and studio if you have them. We will always ask before publishing, and we will take it down on request, no questions. Artists who want their work featured properly should look at the pro team.
More of the day-to-day work, including shop shots that never make it onto this page, goes up on Instagram.
About these photos
Why this tattoo gallery is deliberately small.
It would be trivial to fill this tattoo gallery with stock photography of flawless healed sleeves, and almost every brand in this category does exactly that. We would rather it stayed small and real. What is here is our own photography from working studios, and anything sent in by a client or artist goes up with their name on it and their permission on file.
That means the page grows slowly. It also means that when you look at something here, it is a real piece of work, photographed in the state we say it was in, not a licensed image of somebody else customer bought for forty dollars.
If you are trying to judge whether your own heal is going normally, photographs are a poor tool anyway — the same tattoo looks alarming on day six and perfect on day twenty-one. The written guides are more useful than any picture, because they describe what is happening under the surface rather than what it looks like on a screen.
This tattoo gallery is updated whenever something good comes in rather than on a schedule. If you want to be in the tattoo gallery, send the photo and the artist credit — we will always ask before publishing and take anything down on request.
