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Show HN: I Built an AI Tattoo Generator Using Flux
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- Ryanwalker64 2y agoHey HN! Over the holiday break, I built TattooPRO as a learning project to get comfortable with the new Flux models for AI image generation. TattooPRO, lets you create professional tattoo designs in seconds. If you have an idea for a tattoo but can't find the right design to take into your tattoo artist, generate it with our AI. TattooPRO lets you create fantastic tattoo designs in 3 easy steps. 1. Enter your tattoo idea, and describe how you want your tattoo to look. It pays to be as descriptive as possible for the best result. 2. Choose the style for your tattoo. Do you prefer minimalistic or complex, perhaps something with more color? We have a wide range of styles you want for you to choose from 3. Get your tattoo design! When you're ready, hit create then wait a moment for the tattoo generator to present you with 3 unique concepts based on the idea and style that you've chosen. You can then download the design you like. This has been a really fun project to get up to speed with AI image generation. If you have time, give it a go, and let me know what you think! -Ryan
- egypturnash 2y ago> but can't find the right design to take into your tattoo artist Isn't this what talking to the artist and having them design something for you is for? They have years of practice in listening to clients describe what they want and turning them into an image that works well as a tattoo. If you're cheap they also usually have a ton of pre-made designs known as "flash". What kind of world do you live in where someone with "artist" in their job title can't work with you to create an image?
- ziddoap 2y agoAs someone with most of my body covered, two things I would say: 1) Sometimes I just don't really know what I want. I have an area X big and most of my body is in the style of Y. AI lets me iterate hundreds of design ideas quickly. My artist books a few months out minimum. It's hard to iterate. 2) References really streamline the process. I absolutely agree that my tattoo artist is an artist, so I don't go to them and say "I want this exact thing". However, most of my (and my artists) most enjoyable tattoos have been when I come with solid references and say "this, but put your touch on it" or "here's two ideas, can you combine them into something cool?".
- sparklethunder 2y agoI have a lot of my body covered too. In the beginning my tattoos were chosen/designed with a lot more care for ~meaning~ but nowadays all I care about is that the artist is "good" and has a style I like. Beyond that I don't need AI slop to figure out what to get on my body.
- ziddoap 2y ago>all I care about is that the artist is "good" and has a style I like. Same! >Beyond that I don't need AI slop I don't share the same hatred of AI. If something is cool looking, it's cool. I bring it to my artist as a reference and we work something out. I don't really care about the provenance.
- blondin 2y agovery impressed with the images generated by the model. great work!
- Ryanwalker64 2y agoThanks!
- toasteros 2y agoWhat mitigations do you employ against the high power draw of the GPUs in fossil-fueled datacentres that AI image generators use?
- datadrivenangel 2y agoVery cool! What kind of prompts/methods have you found effective for getting clear backgrounds?
- Ryanwalker64 2y agoIt was surprisingly simple to get clear background. I'm just adding this to the end of the prompt "The design should not be cut off and it should have white space around it."
- sparrish 2y agoFinally a good use of AI art. Although I never understood tattoos. High cost, painful, and (in some circles) culturally looked down on. I just don't get the motivation.
- Ryanwalker64 2y agoThanks, I get that! I've only got 1 myself but it took far too many years to pull the trigger on that haha
- cush 2y agoThere are cultures where tattoos are looked up on and symbolize achievement and status
- itishappy 2y ago> I just don't get the motivation. It's "just" art. Some folks like showing off their style via their homes, some their cars, some their bodies.
- jlarocco 2y agoWhich makes an AI generated tattoo even more perplexing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChildOfChaos 2y agoWhy does it? Tattoo's are about your own personal style and expressing yourself. It doesn't matter if it's AI generated or not. Also these can be a great start to take to a real artist and then they can work off that if you want.
- jlarocco 2y agoEverybody is different, but for the people I know with tattoos picking an artist and having them create a design based on their input was a big part of getting their tattoos. At the end of the day, if that's not a big part of it for other people then more power to them. AI generated at least ensures some level of image quality. To me, it has all the charm of a brick.
- Retr0id 2y agoI appreciate that you made it a one-time payment rather than a subscription service.
- imzadi 2y agoI like the idea, though I couldn't get it to work. It just does the loading animation and then stops without generating anything or giving an error.
- lugvruzzle 2y agoSame for me
- Ryanwalker64 2y agoOh that's odd! Will have look into it, sometimes the API cuts out if it thinks it's NSFW.
- imzadi 2y agoprompt was "watercolor luck cat with cherry blossoms" hope it's not nsfw :)
- itslennysfault 2y agoSame for me. I'm guessing the traffic caused by being posted here made them go over their API limit... or it's just bused. idk. edit... looked at network console. The API is returning a 504 gateway error.
- constantflux 2y agoSame for me as well
- Ryanwalker64 2y agoLooks like we hit a rate limit on the API which has caused the generations to stop working Looking to fix it now!
- smokedetector1 2y agoHonest question, as someone who has thought of making an "AI wrapper" app myself - why would I use this rather than go to Gemini/ChatGPT/StableDiffusion/etc and prompting it myself?
- lukeweston1234 2y agoYeah I have the same issue with these types of projects as well. Could be interesting to map it on a 3D body part or scan so you could see how it looks on your body or next to your other tattoos.
- Ryanwalker64 2y agoI like this, will look into adding these features as it sounds fun to build
- throwup238 2y agoI’d recommend looking at how Photoshop does it. Those asset marketplaces sell template images that contain a layer that maps the user’s image onto the template surface, like for t-shirts and other printing product mockups. https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/mock-up-a-t-shirt-design-with-adobe-photoshop https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/mock-up-a-t...
- Ryanwalker64 2y agoWill have a look, thanks!
- Ryanwalker64 2y agoI'd say it's definitely a personal preference. Using a wrapper gives you a few benefits. - It lets you shortcut the time to having a refined prompt that gives you a somewhat reliable output - Flux (like some models) don't have readily available interfaces as the model is usually required to be self-hosted. For TattooPRO I'm use Together.ai as they host Flux and I can then use their API instead of hosting it myself. The outcome is that users can then get a nice user interface to generate Tattoos with Flux and have some additional features like history and favorites to keep track of their generations. I've also tried to make the experience as mobile-friendly as possible. Hope the answers your question
- ziddoap 2y agoOne-time payment is nice! The other AI Tattoo services I've seen all offer monthly subscriptions which just doesn't make sense. Price is in the ballpark, but a bit steep for me when I can run models on my own hardware. However, for people that don't want to set up a local model for whatever reason, it seems reasonable. How much do you let people fiddle with the parameters? It would be nice if, for example, when I find a good-ish image that I could lock-in the seed or CFG and slightly tweak the prompt.
- llm_trw 2y agoI wish this is something Ai services would understand. You don't charge bases in your teach stack. You charge based on your use case. Tattoos are not something that you get every day so it makes no sense to pretend that your customers will use it like chat gpt. Costing more makes sense since it's a one off transaction that needs to cover overheads. There is a whole raft of services which would seriously benefit from doing the same. Undermind is one I can't justify buying because I do two literature reviews a month at most and have no use for an ongoing subscription I'll forget about. But I'd be happy to pay $5 per search.
- throwup238 2y agoI’m curious why you don’t think tattoo shops would want this as a monthly expense? $30/mo is cheap to give customers the ability to easily generate designs. Like another commenter said in this thread, good artists are often booked months out and that’s just to get the design started. Make a simple app that shows the UI in kiosk mode on an iPad using the store’s account. Even offer a finetuning service that they can use with photos of their own designs to get a unique style per customer (I’ve successfully finetuned myself with under 20 photographs, although style might be better with 50-100). The other big benefit of tattoo shops is that they’re a well established type of business that you can sell to, instead of trying to market to consumers. First thing I’d do is buy a list of tattoo parlors and their contact information from InfoGroup/Data Axle/Dun & Bradstreet and start cold contacting them with a free month so they can try it out. I’d monitor the demos and reach out to those who don’t use their free month much to get feedback and refresh the demo period so they can try again. There are conventions where you can sell to the owners and artists en masse too. Google says there are over 20,000 stores in the US which is enough scale to just have a few GPUs to handle base load and autoscale during peak to drive costs down. I think it can be a very lucrative lifestyle business to someone with good distribution and sales sense, just as long as some VC doesn’t come in and prop up a better resourced competitor.
- oytis 2y agoWho wants AI-generated Image tattooed on their body?
- phagenlocher 2y agoBut who guarantees me that a tattoo artist would actually be able to draw these suggestions? Isn't that usually something you have to work out with the artist beforehand?
- morkalork 2y agoHonestly seems a bit tonedeaf considering doing tattoos has been one of the last refuges for artists looking to get paid for their art.
- Gigachad 2y agoYou can still make money on furry art
- ziddoap 2y agoI mean, you should always be looking at what your tattoo artist can do before you get a tattoo. Don't print off a color cartoon picture from here and go to your local black-and-white realism artist.
- Ryanwalker64 2y agoUPDATE: Looks like we hit a rate limit on the API which has caused the generations to stop working Looking to fix it now!
- dr_kiszonka 2y agoIf you can find a partner that would allow your customers to order the design as one of those temporary tattoo stickers for kids, it would be an awesome product.
- IanCal 2y agoProdigi are a company I've used for print on demand stuff before (a snapshot of the sun in different spectra given a specific time like a birth), though I've only done art prints they do have temporary tattoos. https://www.prodigi.com/ https://www.prodigi.com/
- Ryanwalker64 2y agoUPDATE: API looks like it's back up! Hopefully it'll last longer next time. Didn't expect the hug of death with this haha
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zacharyvoase 2y agoI am heavily tattooed and I tried generating a few designs. I'm sorry to say that everything it suggested was awful, and if an artist ever showed me any of this in their flash collection I would block them on Instagram and potentially call the police.
- urronglol 2y ago[dead]
- inhumantsar 2y agoI asked it for "one hand stabbing another with an ornate dagger, traditional style." It got the style right-ish but everything else was terribly wrong. Daggers with multiple blades, hands with hands on them, fingers with multiple fingernails, etc. This could be useful if it can reliably get the core requirements correct though. I can see myself generating some ideas with this and taking them to an artist as a basis for them to start with. OP: It would probably be good to have a "these aren't even close, please try again" button which allows for a couple free retries.
- zacharyvoase 2y agobut here's the thing: why spend a bunch of time trying to formulate a prompt to give to a machine to generate a bad image to bring to an artist who would then refine it, when you could just say to the artist "one hand stabbing another with an ornate dagger, traditional style" and get what you want in one shot?
- TuringNYC 2y agoCongrats on the launch and cool idea! Some questions - I noticed you limit to three free images, but incognito browsers effectively give you unlimited free images. Do you have a plan to prevent abuse, e.g. via fingerprinting? Did you notice people trying to abuse this? I'm more curious because I have a similar idea in a different space and noticed people running up my diffusion model meter. - Not sure how long you've had this live, but do the paid accounts at least cover the cost of your infra/inferences? - Why flux specifically? Was it an optimization on cost? latency? quality? ease? I see you're on GCP, why not keep it inside GCP all the way and use Gemini?
- Ryanwalker64 2y agowow 8000 tattoos were generated since this post went live