I walked into Blackdot’s tattoo studio in Austin’s east side on a sweltering May afternoon. After shaking my sweat-soaked hand, founder and CEO Joel Pennington led me up into an office building and opened the door to a small, three-room space. Critics have unflatteringly compared the studio to a sterile hospital room — a comparison not entirely without merit. In a corner room, the machine I had come here to see loomed: a humming, fridge-sized device reminiscent of an old X-ray unit. Blackdot calls it the world’s first “automatic tattooing device.”
The space was filled with signs of the path traveled so far. Pennington handed me several slabs of floppy, odd-smelling artificial skin the company uses for testing. Before that, they tested tattoos on pigskin — a close stand-in for human flesh, sourced from a local Asian grocery store. He says they initially tried sourcing it from a Mexican market but found that skin was simply too dry.
Pennington tells The Verge his device is definitely not a “robot,” since it doesn’t make high-level, autonomous decisions. One thing it definitely is: polarizing. Some, like the storied New York shop Bang Bang, have embraced the technology and are now using the machine to perform text tattoos in-house. Others worry the device could bring the same automation anxieties felt in other industries to tattooing’s doorstep.
Photo: Blackdot
Tattoos are more popular than ever. As of 2023, Pew estimated that nearly a third (32 percent) of US adults have at least one tattoo, rising to 46 percent among millennials. The practice, in various forms, dates back at least 7,000 years and spans many cultures and regions. The mummified remains of “Ötzi the Iceman,” who died in the snow-covered Italian Alps around 5,300 years ago, bear 61 tattoos, including two wrist cuffs.
Over time, incremental technological advances followed — inks improved in color and longevity, and electric tattoo machines emerged in the 19th century, speeding up the process. Still, at the end of the day, tattooing has always come down to one human piercing another’s skin and applying ink. Blackdot’s device would mark a notable technological departure.
Pennington himself wasn’t a “tattoo guy.” A former head of global business development in industrial cybersecurity at Cisco, he officially incorporated Blackdot in 2019 after a series of brainstorming sessions with a business partner. (Earlier ideas included several blockchain-based payment systems, which were ultimately scrapped.) The decision to dive into tattoos actually stemmed partly from Pennington’s interest in coffee culture around the world. Pennington says he noticed the coolest, most memorable people in many of those shops had something in common: many of them were sporting ink.
The result, after several years of prototyping and lots of poking, was Blackdot: a company centered around a large, industrial fridge-sized tattoo machine that Pennington claims can outperform human artists. In addition to the device, Blackdot aims to “centralize” tattoo art by creating a marketplace in which artists receive a royalty each time their design is used by the machine. It’s a bold vision but still incredibly nascent.
Meeting the machine
Blackdot uses proprietary software to convert an image into a “.tattoo” file format readable by its device. Pennington claims the system can handle nearly any image, whether a standard tattoo design, a complex illustration, or even generative art created by an algorithm. A human operator then places the client’s arm or leg in position, straps it down, and places another device in position. The operator can override or stop the machine in case of emergencies. The device then works section by section. Machine vision guides the process, helping the device track its position in real time. As in a traditional tattoo studio, a stencil must be applied first. Without it, the machine can lose its place during the procedure. The final result is an image composed of tens of thousands of tiny gray dots — basically a high-tech version of pointillism. The device does not currently produce color tattoos.
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