Wow, you completely and utterly missed the entire point of everything I wrote and just made up strawmen Disney creates design (action 1). Someone puts it on hu

Wow, you completely and utterly missed the entire point of everything I wrote and just made up strawmen Disney creates design (action 1). Someone puts it on human skin (action 2). Someone uses that image of the tattoo on a person as promotion (action 3). Most people would agree even if you tattoo Darth Vader on your body you can't use Darth Vader on your body for promotion it belongs to Disney Change action 1 to the same person as action 2. Why does the tattoo artists not get the same rights as Disney? Nothing changed except replacing Disney with Tattoo artist. In fact let's add a 3rd case. Tattoo artist hires friend to design tatoo. Why is this friend not afforded the same rights as Disney? AFAICT the law is on the side of the person that created the art (or owns the copyright in the art if the person that created it transffered their rights). If you tattoo Darth Vader on yourself the person who owns the rights to Darth Vader doesn't suddenly lose their rights. Instead, you irresponsibly used someone else's IP. Nothing changes if that IP holder is suddenly not Disney. This is true for normal contracts, at least in the USA. If you contract an artist to draw something for you, unless you specifically get them to sign away all their rights in the art via the contract they retain those rights. https://www.google.com/search?q=artist+retain+rights+unless+work+for+hire& https://www.google.com/search?q=artist+retain+rights+unless+... You could argue the person paying for the tattoo as a reasonable expectation that the tattoo now belongs to them, not the tattoo artist. But that doesn't seem to fit with normal case law. If you pay your buddy $100 to make a logo for your new youtube video you may think you're done. The logo is yours. But AFAICT unless you specifically signed a contract your buddy would actually still own the rights to that logo regardless of the fact that you paid him. See all the links that google search brings up. Even though most poeple would say common sense says the artist has no rights, you paid them, case law says otherwise. Without a specific contract saying otherwise you don't own it even if you paid.