52,000+
working tattoo artists in the US (IBISWorld)
Upload a client's photo or your own artwork and get back a clean stencil that prints at true size on your thermal printer: tiled across Letter or A4 sheets with registration marks and a 1-inch calibration square, so what you print is what lands on skin.
Print. Check the square. Tattoo.
Free preview. No account. Your image is converted, not stored.
Starting presets, not lab calibrations: they nudge line density and weight for common printer and paper combos. We tune them with working artists' feedback.
Every pack: true-size tiled print PDF, exact-size PNG at 300 DPI, SVG, and a run sheet with print instructions.
working tattoo artists in the US (IBISWorld)
tattoos a day per artist, and every single one starts as a stencil
stencils a month for a busy artist. Tracing them by hand is the tax.
calibration square on tile 1, so a rescaled print gets caught before it reaches skin
The hour you spend hand-tracing a reference is an hour you are not tattooing. HectoInk does the tracing and the sizing; you keep the judgment calls.
A client photo, a flash scan, a Procreate export, any PNG, JPG or WEBP.
Three modes (Outline, Linework, Bold), a detail slider and a line-weight slider. Preview updates before you commit.
Tell it the width in inches. The pack is built at that exact size at 300 DPI, tiled if it outgrows one sheet.
Print at 100%, check the calibration square, overlap the tiles on the crosses, run it through your thermal printer.
Most stencil tools export a picture and leave the sizing to you. HectoInk exports a print: exact inches, 0.5 inch tile overlap, registration crosses, and a 1-inch square on the first tile that exposes any printer rescaling before the stencil touches skin.
Detail and line weight are separate controls because they fail differently: too much detail clogs on skin, too little loses the design. The run sheet warns you when a design is too fine for the size you picked, before you waste a sheet.
Tiled print PDF for the thermal printer, an exact-size PNG for your tablet, and an SVG if you want to push lines around in a vector editor. One upload, one download, no re-exporting.
No iPad app, no desktop install, nothing between you and the chair. It works on the shop computer, your phone, or the front-desk PC, and your images are converted, not stored.
This pair came out of the converter on this page: a studio photo in, Linework mode out. Run your own reference through it and judge the lines yourself, the preview is free.
Prices published by each maker, checked October 2026. The drawing apps are good tools; they just leave the tracing, sizing and tiling to you.
| Tool | Published price | What it is | True-size tiled print PDF |
|---|---|---|---|
| HectoInk | $6 single / $14 per mo | Web stencil maker: lines, exact size, print pack | Yes, with calibration square |
| StencilAI | $14 / $29 / $69 per mo | AI stencil app | Not its focus |
| Stencify | $4.99 per wk / $47.99 per yr | Stencil app | Not its focus |
| StencilMaker | $7.99 per mo | Stencil app | Not its focus |
| Procreate + hand tracing | $12.99 once | Drawing app: you trace, size and tile by hand | Manual |
One stencil pays for itself if it saves you ten minutes of tracing. A subscription pays for itself the first day of a booked week.
If your printer takes Letter or A4 stencil paper, yes. The PDF is built at 300 DPI on that exact sheet size. Print at 100% scale with fit-to-page off, then measure the calibration square on tile 1: if it is exactly 1 inch, every line on the sheet is true size.
Clear, well-lit references with real contrast. Linework mode handles portraits and realism references; Outline is best for artwork and flash; Bold is for simple, graphic designs that need to read from across the room. Flat, even lighting beats a dramatic photo every time.
It extracts the lines a realism stencil actually needs: the map, not the shading. Heavy shading does not transfer as a stencil, so the converter keeps structure and leaves value work to you, and the run sheet flags designs whose detail is too fine for the size you set.
You can, and many artists do. It costs you the tracing time on every client, plus manual sizing and tiling for anything bigger than one sheet. HectoInk exists for the part of the job that is mechanical; the drawing judgment stays yours.
No. Images are converted in the request and not stored. Client references are your clients' business, not ours.
Yes. Anything you make with HectoInk is yours to tattoo, on any plan including Single.