Permanent Markings

Hello everyone! I created Permanent Markings to solve an issue I had where I was trying to find a tattoo artist for a piece I had in mind, and I found it to be unnecessarily difficult. Instagram seems to be the go to place to look for artists that work in a specific style, but I found it to be full of people abusing hashtags which dilutes search results, contains largely the same few 'popular' artists' work in the first few pages, and has a TON of scammers. So I looked for alternatives and I found a few places that attempted to do what I've done here. However what I saw was that they required artists to sign up for their site. This limited their collection to the point that outside of cities like New York or LA they had a handful of artists listed for each city. My hometown of Houston being a good example as for a city of several million some sites had less than a hundred artists listed and most of them were the same artists proactive enough to sign up for the other sites as well. In the end I decided to make my own list. After all if I'm going to get something inked onto my body that will last a lifetime I might as well take the time to find the right person to do it. So I wrote some tools to collect artist information both from social media sites as well as from the web in general. And I reviewed each artist to be sure they were genuine before I added them to the main list. Eventually I had a sizable list of several thousand artists. At this point I thought that I might as well make the information public so that others may find it helpful. I decided to reach out to a few artists and get feedback on what may be useful and I tried to incorporate the feedback where I could. And for the last year or so I have been building what is now Permanent Markings! Users can search using style, location, distance, or name/handle, and can favorite artists to remember them for later. All included artists have their social media or website listed on their profile page by default so you can see their work. Artists can claim a profile by authorizing via Instagram or by sending an email and completing manual validation. Once validated they can customize the information on their profile page including location, name, upcoming guest spots, and anything else they'd like to display with the editor that supports markdown. Artists can also create forms using a drag and drop form builder and collect responses that they can turn into appointments. All for free with some limitations to things like image uploads to prevent any crazy abuse. I may add a more robust paid option if users max out their capacity and there is a demand for it. But for now it's all free! I believe the list contains over 15k artists from around the world right now, and I try to add more every week. I have a backlog of a few thousand artists and I'm always adding more. I'm currently working through 'Tribal' style artists now as they take a lot more time. You can read about that in my little dev blog if you're interested in my rant on that subject here: https://permanentmarkings.com/ar... If you're still reading thanks for checking out my project! Hope you find it helpful and have a great start to your new year. Cheers, Blake

@blake_dillon, it's amazing! You have enabled artists to easily locate each other and have given them the tool to take their work to the next level - bravo!