Tattoo Stencil

Tattoo Stencil is for the narrow stage before the needle starts moving: laying out tattoo designs as stencils rather than doing any real drawing work. By our assessment, it is a straightforward prep app for tattoo artists and hobbyists who want a stencil from an image or sketch. The good part is obvious: it focuses on transfer, outline and pattern preparation instead of pretending to be a full illustration studio. The downside is that stencil tools are only as good as the source art, so rough inputs stay rough. In practice this kind of app is about cropping, tracing and testing how a design will sit on skin, which is more fiddly than glossy. It sits somewhere between photo tools and design aids, and that makes it more practical than flashy. The catalogue places Tattoo Stencil under Photo & Video, which is believable for an image-to-stencil tool. Its ceiling is narrow, but that is also its point.