The Trad Tattoo Directory is live

The Trad Tattoo Directory is now live

This project started back in October of 2024 for a very simple reason. I could not figure out a good way to keep track of tattoo artists I was seeing on Instagram. I kept following great artists, but they would fall out of my head, or I would forget their name. It was a mess trying to keep track of this through Instagram.

The problem with tattoo discovery

Almost every tattoo artist’s online presence is built around Instagram. That is fine until you actually try to use it for discovery.

Instagram search is not equipped to handle basic queries like “traditional tattoo artists Nashville Tennessee.” It sorts based on all the wrong signals. It defaults to simple word matching and ranks results by likes and followers instead of relevance or location.

The state of Instagram search for this use case in October 2024 and even now just sucks.

Because of that, discovery ends up being fragmented Reddit posts and shared Google Docs full of recommendations. Most of those go nowhere and disappear a few days after the post. If you were not there at the right time, you missed it.

Scrappy workarounds

I first tried solving this by saving artists on my personal Instagram account. That immediately flooded my feed with tattoo content. Which is fine, but I also like seeing photos of cats, coffee, and chess.

So I made a burner tattoo account. That worked. My personal feed went back to cats, coffee, and chess. I started organizing artists into collections based on cities.

At some point I looked at those collections and thought, why not just put this into a simple frontend. That sounded like a great idea.

The real wake up call

Instagram shut the door on their APIs in December of 2024, killing that direction entirely. Playing nicely with Instagram was no longer an option, even though it was the source of truth for every tattoo artist.

That forced me to step back and think about why I wanted to build this at all. Meta can disrupt the livelihood of a community with one algorithm tweak. One product decision and everything shifts.

Most artists live and die by Instagram. For all the upside, the reality is that algorithm changes can directly impact the livelihoods of thousands and thousands of artists.

That did not sit right with me.

Fuck it, let’s build something

So yeah. Fuck all that. Let’s build our own database. Slow roll it. Fill it with great shops and artists. No algorithms. No follower counts. Just real artists and shops with an easy way to search. Put a finger in Meta’s eye and see what happens.

The initial version was simple and it still is. A basic SQL database, a React frontend, and a big fat search input. That part was easy.

The hard part was the grind. Adding artists one by one. Over the past two years, slowly but surely, I added everyone that looked sick.

For each artist I logged their name, location, Instagram handle, and the shop they worked at. At first this meant manually entering everything line by line through the Supabase web view. It was tedious and slow.

Things finally picked up once I built a simple admin view to add artists much faster. That is when this started to feel real instead of just an idea.

Why ship now?

A few nights ago I was sitting at home thinking, why not just put this out into the world now.

Honestly, it feels like a race against time. Someone might be looking for an artist today and settle for someone else without realizing there is a killer artist two miles away. That feels like a miss worth fixing.

This really is doing the lord’s work and people need it in their hands now, not when it is perfect.

I shared it on r/traditionaltattoos and it is live. It is simple, it is rough around the edges, and it does exactly what I need it to do. If you have feedback, good or bad, I want to hear it.

This is just the start.

www.trad-directory.com