Why we build this
We looked at a hundred tattoo studios before we built anything. Almost none of what we found was bad design. It was abandonment — good shops with real reputations, sitting behind websites nobody had touched in years.
A hundred shops across Seattle, Portland and Southern California.
We went through them one at a time — loading the sites, checking the domains, reading the booking flows. We were expecting dated design. That was not the problem.
Some never built one. Others let the domain lapse — the link is still in their Instagram bio, and it goes nowhere.
Its footer still carried a copyright from 2015 and a line reading “last site update September 2019.” The shop is excellent and still busy.
The home page and the shop page disagreed by an hour. Customers were turning up to a locked door and blaming the shop.
A thirteen-artist shop with a nationally known owner was running its entire appointment flow through a free Gmail address.
REVIEWED 2026SEATTLE, PORTLAND, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIACOUNTS, NOT NAMESONE FIGURE COMPUTED AT PAGE LOAD SO IT CANNOT GO STALE
We have not named any of them here. They are real businesses who have not hired us, and putting their problems on our marketing page would be a poor way to introduce ourselves. The four studios named on the home page are the exception, and a deliberate one: we built something for each of them, unpaid and uncommissioned, and you cannot show a build without saying whose shop it was for.
A tattoo is permanent. The website in front of it should not look temporary.
Tattooers spend years getting good. The work is careful, it is expensive, and it stays on somebody for the rest of their life. Then the first thing a new client sees is a page that has not been touched since 2019, or a booking form that goes to a Gmail address, or nothing at all.
That gap is the whole reason this studio exists. Not because shops need prettier websites — because the site is doing damage that the shop cannot see. Every one of those problems is quiet. Nobody calls to tell you your hours are wrong on one page. They just go somewhere else.
So we build the thing that should have been there, hand it over, and keep it current. That is it. There is no bigger idea behind it.
One person. That is the whole company.
Blackline Studios is Ethan Gaither, working as a sole proprietor out of Battle Ground, Clark County, Washington.
The person you talk to on the sales call is the person who builds your site. There is no account manager, no handoff, and no junior doing the work after you sign. That is also the reason we take a limited number of studios at a time — the calendar is the constraint, not the ambition.
It means you get someone who has actually read your booking flow. It also means we will tell you when something is out of scope instead of quietly doing it badly.
Everything on the record.
- Entity
- Sole proprietorship trading as Blackline Studios
- Location
- Battle Ground, Clark County, Washington
- Contact
- blackline@black-line-studios.com
- Call hours
- 9am–4pm Pacific, Monday to Friday
- Governing law
- Washington State (see Terms)
- Term
- Six months initial, then month to month, 30 days notice
- Ownership
- Client owns the site outright, from launch
- Ad spend
- Never passes through us
- Tracking
- None
Five things we will not move on.
You own it
The site is yours from the day it launches. Not licensed, not rented, not locked to a platform you have to keep paying us to access. If you ever leave, you leave with the whole thing.
Ad spend never touches our account
You pay Google and Meta directly, on your card, and you set the number. We charge for building and running campaigns, not for handling your money. Agencies that bundle ad spend into a retainer are hiding their margin inside your budget.
Your work is the design
We do not put a shop's photography behind a stock template. The palette comes out of your logo, the story comes off your own walls, and if the only good photo you have is a thumbnail we will tell you so instead of shipping it blurry.
No lock-in, no term you did not agree to
Six months on the care plan, then month to month. We would rather earn the next one than trap you in the last one.
We say what we do not know
If we cannot verify who works at your shop, we leave the names off until you confirm them. Guessing on your behalf is how a website ends up telling your customers something untrue.
This is not for every shop.
If your books are full for the next eight months and you are turning work away, you do not need us. Say so on the call and we will not push it.
If you want a site you can rebuild yourself every few months, a template will serve you better and cost you less. We are worth paying when you want it handled and kept current without thinking about it.
And if you want a thousand fake reviews and a growth hack, that is a different kind of company. We are not it.
No analytics. No ad pixel. No cookie banner.
There is nothing on this site tracking you. No Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, no session recording. There is no cookie consent banner because there is nothing to consent to. The only third-party request this page makes is to Google Fonts.
Read the privacy policyWant us to look at yours?
Thirty minutes. We go through your site, your booking flow and your Google listing, and tell you what we would change — whether or not you work with us.