On Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, our Senior Producer Maggie Nye rolled up her jacket sleeve to show me her new tattoo: a classic, pixelated cursor arrow. TechCrunch’s Becca Szkutak got a matching cursor, while Theresa Loconsolo got a smiling moon.
I guessed that at some point during all the Disrupt hoopla, Maggie and Becca wandered off to some trendy San Francisco tattoo shop to cement their friendship with appropriately tech-themed ink (and maybe Theresa was there too?). That seemed like a more logical explanation than the reality, which is that they got these tattoos at Disrupt — yes, literally at Disrupt, on the Moscone Center’s convention floor, while upstairs, there was probably a talk going on about product-market fit or agentic AI.
Hundreds of startups showed their stuff in the expo hall as part of the Battlefield 200 — there’s robo chefs, spacecraft insurance providers, a shortcut for recycling plastic — and then amid the chaos, Tattd turned their booth into a mini tattoo shop.
Maggie’s tattoo Image Credits:TechCrunch
Tattd is a platform that helps tattoo seekers find artists whose portfolios match the kind of tattoo they’re looking for.
The startup uses generative AI to create a mockup of a design, but these synthetic designs aren’t actually getting inked on anyone’s body. Rather, Tattd puts the AI-generated design through a reverse image search to find an artist whose work resembles the mockup, so that the client and artist can work together to create an original design, as one normally would when they get connected with a tattoo artist.
“If you go to ChatGPT and say something like, ‘I want to see a butterfly in a Japanese traditional style with heavier lines,’ they don’t know what that means,” founder Laura Schaak told TechCrunch.
Just feet away, TechCrunch Deputy Managing Editor Karyne Levy was getting an escape key tattooed on her upper arm.
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Karyne’s tattoo Image Credits:TechCrunch
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