We are not a collective with a house style. We share rent, a sterilisation room and a kettle. What each of us does is genuinely different, and so is what each of us will politely refuse.
Single-needle work, script, small botanical and anatomical pieces. Nine years in, the last four here, and before that four years in a walk-in shop in Porto doing about six tattoos a day — which is where the speed and the steady hand came from.
Mara does most of the studio's first tattoos. If you have never been tattooed and the idea of it makes you slightly ill, book the free consultation with her. She will talk you through the whole thing in a way that is neither patronising nor falsely reassuring.
She will usually offer an alternative rather than just refusing — thicker lines, different placement, or a slightly larger version of the same idea.
Heavy black, geometric and ornamental work, and most of the studio's cover-ups. Came out of graphic design and still draws everything flat, at full size, before it goes anywhere near a body.
The honest version: a cover-up is nearly always bigger and darker than what is underneath, and it takes at least two sessions. Kai will tell you at the consultation whether it is a cover-up or a laser-first job. He says laser more often than clients expect.
Bands, mandalas, chest and sternum pieces designed around the actual body rather than dropped onto it flat. This is why he wants a photo of the placement before the drawing starts, and why he redraws after the stencil roughly half the time.
Sleeves and backs, booked as a run of full days six to eight weeks apart. He will map the whole thing before the first needle goes in, so you know what you are committing to and what it will cost in total.
Kai's waiting time is the longest — five to six weeks. He keeps it that way on purpose rather than taking more clients: a cover-up rushed into a gap in the diary is how you end up with two tattoos you dislike instead of one.
Colour, saturation and long sessions. She takes fewer clients than the other two and it is not a marketing position — a piece she is happy with usually needs three or four full days, and there are only so many of those in a year.
Realism is the one style where the reference matters more than the artist. Bring the best photograph you can find — high resolution, good light, and ideally not a screenshot of a screenshot. A bad reference limits the result far more than anything that happens in the chair.
The healing gap is not negotiable. Colour packed into skin that has not settled comes out patchy, and fixing it costs another session.
Demo note: Estúdio Tinta does not exist. The studio, the three artists, the rates and the waiting times were invented to demonstrate a booking calendar where the length of the session decides which slots are even offered. The photographs are stock images of unnamed artists at work, not portfolio pieces by anyone named on this page.
Pick "no preference" in the calendar and describe the idea. We sort it out between ourselves — it takes one conversation over the kettle and saves you guessing.