[HN Gopher] Show HN: I Built an AI Tattoo Generator Using Flux
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Show HN: I Built an AI Tattoo Generator Using Flux
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Author : Ryanwalker64
Score : 34 points
Date : 2025-01-07 20:39 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tattoopro.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tattoopro.ai)
| Ryanwalker64 wrote:
| Hey 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| very impressed with the images generated by the model. great
| work!
| Ryanwalker64 wrote:
| Thanks!
| toasteros wrote:
| What mitigations do you employ against the high power draw of
| the GPUs in fossil-fueled datacentres that AI image generators
| use?
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Very cool! What kind of prompts/methods have you found effective
| for getting clear backgrounds?
| Ryanwalker64 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Finally 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 wrote:
| Thanks, I get that! I've only got 1 myself but it took far too
| many years to pull the trigger on that haha
| cush wrote:
| There are cultures where tattoos are looked up on and symbolize
| achievement and status
| itishappy wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Which makes an AI generated tattoo even more perplexing.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Why 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 wrote:
| Everybody 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.
| itishappy wrote:
| I tend to agree, which is probably why I don't have any
| tattoos, but my friends that do have them make me suspect
| that they may care about different stuff than us.
|
| Most of the tattoos that I've seen are frankly uninspired.
| Dragons, flowers, skulls, knives. Some of the more unique
| ones are album artwork, but how creative is that really?
| But nobody seems bothered by this, they all show them off
| proudly! (There are some exceptions... My cousin had a full
| sleeve of Freddy Krueger making the pussy eating symbol
| with his blade fingers that was impressive. Odd choice to
| be sure, but impressive.)
|
| I've come to believe that the draw here is the act of
| personalizing one's own body, not the quality of the art.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I appreciate that you made it a one-time payment rather than a
| subscription service.
| imzadi wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Same for me
| Ryanwalker64 wrote:
| Oh that's odd! Will have look into it, sometimes the API cuts
| out if it thinks it's NSFW.
| imzadi wrote:
| prompt was "watercolor luck cat with cherry blossoms" hope
| it's not nsfw :)
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Same 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 wrote:
| Same for me as well
| Ryanwalker64 wrote:
| Looks like we hit a rate limit on the API which has caused
| the generations to stop working Looking to fix it now!
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| Honest 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 wrote:
| Yeah 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 wrote:
| I like this, will look into adding these features as it
| sounds fun to build
| throwup238 wrote:
| I'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...
| Ryanwalker64 wrote:
| Will have a look, thanks!
| Ryanwalker64 wrote:
| I'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
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| Its not that theres no benefit at all, it's more like does it
| give me _enough_ upside compared to something that is easy
| and free, doesnt require me trusting an app Ive never heard
| of, taking out my credit card, worrying about getting ripped
| off, etc.
|
| But I could well be wrong, I wish you success.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I _think_ it can make sense when you have some secret-sauce
| mixed in for whatever the application is. A custom fine-tuned
| model, text embedding, LoRAs, etc. It 's certainly less
| convincing to me when someone offers just a plain wrapper
| around free/cheap/easily-accessible models.
|
| But I can see the appeal of making it a bit easier for non-
| technical people when you add in surrounding features
| (favorites, history, etc.).
| throwup238 wrote:
| At this point even the fine tuning isn't a big
| differentiator. It costs a few bucks to make one in Replicate
| and you don't even have to caption the photos because it can
| use another model to do that (I usually download and improve
| them for the second run). You just upload a zip file of
| images and give it a keyword.
|
| There's an art to fine tuning but plenty of laypeople have
| done it, it just takes time to experiment and some cash for
| the cloud providers.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I think your definition of laypeople and my definition of
| laypeople are different. If I talked to anyone not in my IT
| department about fine-tuning, their eyes would glaze over
| in 2 seconds.
|
| These types of services are, in my opinion, targeted at the
| people who live their entire computer lives in Chrome &
| Excel. Not people who know what fine-tuning is or can
| recognize what "Replicate" is without Google.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I don't mean it's common knowledge among laypeople, just
| that someone determined enough to spend a weekend reading
| image gen documentation and the StableDiffusion subreddit
| can probably figure it out. It's not like they need to
| take a months long bootcamp to learn to code first. Once
| they sign up for replicate (and I guess github for SSO
| first), all they have to do is find the page for the fine
| tuning and upload a zipfile of images.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| Its not that it has no appeal, its that I expect it to be a
| tough sell to get people to actually take out their credit
| card for this when its free and good enough to go to chat.com
| or gemini. But I may be wrong.
| cloudking wrote:
| You're not the target user. Average users have no idea what
| you're talking about.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| I think the target user is capable of going to chatgpt and
| saying "give me tattoo ideas"
| cloudking wrote:
| By that logic, no one should build a startup that generates
| tattoos then?
|
| Speak to average, non-technical users. You'd be surprised
| how many people have a very vague idea what ChatGPT is
| capable of. They aren't using it everyday like you and I.
| Relating this back to OP comment, expecting them to know
| about effective prompting techniques, Stable Diffusion etc
| is unrealistic.
|
| One of the reasons OpenAI offers APIs, is so you can build
| startups on top of their tech for average non-technical
| users.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| > By that logic, no one should build a startup that
| generates tattoos then?
|
| Is this like a law of the universe I'm not aware of, that
| you must be able to create a profitable startup that
| generates tattoo ideas?
|
| > One of the reasons OpenAI offers APIs, is so you can
| build startups on top of their tech for average non-
| technical users.
|
| A profitable product will make use of APIs to do
| something that a user couldn't do almost just as well by
| just prompting ChatGPT themselves.
| Vampiero wrote:
| It's funny that we went from "ChatGPT is going to unlock
| AGI and displace millions of workers" to "the only thing
| that came out of ChatGPT is a million of API wrappers
| that do nothing worthwhile at all" in like two years.
|
| I mean it's basically the same thing as NFT/crypto
| grifters, just on a different tech stack. It's not about
| actually solving problems, it's about speculation to
| them.
|
| Time to make a markov chain as a service startup...
| ziddoap wrote:
| One-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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| Ryanwalker64 wrote:
| I like the idea of locking in the seed and params. Will see
| what I can do
| Vampiero wrote:
| > for people that don't want to set up a local model for
| whatever reason, it seems reasonable.
|
| The reason being that in order to get a GPU that doesn't commit
| sudoku the moment you install SD, you need to shell out way
| more than the price of a single tattoo.
|
| That's why people who own many 3d printers make money. If all
| it takes to print a model is one 3d printer, why doesn't
| literally every single person on the planet own one?
| ziddoap wrote:
| For sure, cost is maybe the most common reason.
|
| But I have friends who game on cards that can run SD no
| problem (prior to a recent upgrade, I had SD running on a
| 2060S with no problem, which is like $250?), they just don't
| want to for other reasons (laziness, hard drive space, feel
| that it is too complicated, etc.).
| oytis wrote:
| Who wants AI-generated Image tattooed on their body?
| phagenlocher wrote:
| But 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 wrote:
| Honestly seems a bit tonedeaf considering doing tattoos has
| been one of the last refuges for artists looking to get paid
| for their art.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| UPDATE: 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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Prodigi 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/
| Ryanwalker64 wrote:
| UPDATE: API looks like it's back up! Hopefully it'll last longer
| next time.
|
| Didn't expect the hug of death with this haha
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