Spent a year building a website and webapp map of tattoo artists, going live tomorrow

This has been our main project for just over a year now, and we're doing our Product Hunt launch tomorrow morning (in just over an hour as of right now!) The site itself is already live, so you can actually try it right now:

  - Map: https://tattoo.guide/map/

  - Site: https://tattoo.guide

The idea started with Jake and Kelly Bertelsen, two of the best tattoo artists in the country. Finding a great tattoo artist can be a frustrating process: You open Instagram, search a hashtag, scroll forever, open a dozen profiles, and still have no real idea who's good or anywhere near you. There's no way to actually filter by style and location. So we set out to build the thing that should already exist.

It's a map. Thousands of tattoo artists and studios are plotted on it. You filter by style (fine line, black & grey, traditional, and so on), filter by location, click a pin, and you get the artist's portfolio and studio info. That's the whole idea...going from "I want this kind of piece near me" to a shortlist in seconds instead of losing an afternoon to it.

I handled most of the build, so for anyone curious about the technical side: the data lives in WordPress so the team can keep listings updated without touching code, and the map itself is a Django app pulling from that, rendered with Mapbox. The parts that really ate my time were geocoding thousands of studio addresses without blowing past API imits, clustering the pins so the map doesn't lag when you zoom out, and getting the mobile version to actually feel smooth (the drawer and map panning fought me for weeks).

The other half of this has been SEO and structuring the actual main site so Google can find and rank every artist, style, and city page, since search is going to be how most people discover it. Far less glamorous than the map, but probably just as important for whether it works.

It's free, with no signup required to browse.

The Product Hunt launch goes up tomorrow morning. If you have a minute before then, try the map on your own city and tell me:

  - How do you find a tattoo artist right now, and what's the most frustrating part of that process?

  - What would make you trust a directory like this enough to reach out to an artist through it, instead of just DMing

  them on Instagram?

  - What single piece of info on an artist's profile would make this a no-brainer for you: Pricing, availability, more notes and info from the map founders (Jake and Kelly Bertelsen) on each individual artist, guest spots, something else?

Happy to answer anything about the product or how it's built.