Almost every week I get a DM that opens with a screenshot. "Hi! Can you do this one?" with a photo of someone else's tattoo. I always feel a little bad about my answer, because the honest answer is no.
The reason isn't snobbery. It's two things, both of them practical.
The first is that the piece in the photo was solved for the artist who drew it. Their line weight, their machine, their pacing, their hand. If I trace it onto your skin I inherit a thousand little decisions someone else made, and the result is always — always — a worse version of the original. You'd be paying me to make something that already exists somewhere better.
The second is that that piece already belongs to a person. Walking around with a copy of someone else's tattoo feels strange to me, and I'd guess it feels strange to most people once they think about it. The whole point of a permanent piece is that it's yours.
So when you send me a reference, what I do is read it. I look at why you saved it. I ask you a few questions — what about it stopped your scroll, what's the story you actually want the piece to carry, where on your body it lives. Then I sit with that for a couple of days, and I draw something new. Sometimes it ends up looking pretty close to your reference. Sometimes it goes somewhere different. Either way it's drawn from scratch in my hand, for you, for that arm.
That's most of what custom means to me. The rest is just patience.
