Tattoo Submission Guidelines and Tips for tattoo artists

These rules were implemented to improve the overall experience of using for both artists and users on Tattoo Awards platform and increase the quality of representation of an artist and his tattoos.

In this guideline, we will share with you the best experiences and give some tips to make the best from your art at Tattoo Awards.

1. Make sure your profile is full and has an up to date information. Navigate to editing your profile and fill in in tabs as much info as you can — it greatly increases your exposure to them as an artist and even allows you to participate in some competitions (apprentice competitions for example, if you are tattooing less than 2 years).
   Make sure that your currently filled information is up to date. Sometimes an artist can forget that he has changed his or her Instagram name and forgot to update it on Tattoo Awards leading to loss of traffic to his or her profile.

2. Upload a tattoo.
First, an artist uploads his tattoos and thus creates a tattoo gallery in his profile. In an effort to create the highest quality gallery, please follow some simple guidelines for it:

• Upload a picture from your PC/Phone or take a photo while uploading with enough lighting to avoid Underexposed (too dark) or Overexposed (too bright) images.

fantastic tattoo, but taking a bit more bright picture would be better

normally exposed image

• Make sure that your tattoo has the maximum scale and occupies the most part of an image as possible.

In this example — tattoo takes a relatively small percentage of the frame

nicely scaled tattoo image — takes most part of the frame

• If possible - center your tattoo on the image when taking a picture or crop it if you’re preparing a picture in an editor on your PC/Phone

nice item, but with centering issues

• Upload one tattoo per item - do not make collages (unless it is required by a competition e.g a collage “before-after” coverup competition)

collages are not allowed — upload 4 separate pictures

cover up type of tattoo “before-after” are allowed in its competition

• When uploading from PC/Phone make sure that the image has enough size. Small images may be upscaled and have reduced quality. Recommended size is 1000 pixels and more.

3. Submitting a tattoo into a competition
When an artist decides to enter a competition, he (or she) submits one or more tattoo images from gallery into a competition, let’s call such entries “competition items” to avoid confusion with gallery items (that are not participating in any competitions yet).
If you’re participating in a “community vote” type of competition you need the most votes to get to the prize place and be a winner. This will help you:

• Submit your best and finished items to competitions — unfinished tattoos will be disqualified. Make the best picture of your best tattoos you have.
• Fill in tags (later we will provide helping tags list for all artists), short 1-line description, placement and gender of it. It greatly increases exposure.
• Refer users and ask them to subscribe on your profile to gain more support:

Get your referral link in your referrals tab

• Share in socials links on your competition items and ask users to vote. To vote a user completes quick registration (as a non-artist, but rather a tattoo-enthusiast type of an account) and by voting takes part in voters challenge:
  https://tattooawards.com/leaderboards

Users that cast votes for artists’ competition items are ranked in this leaderboard. There are 2 metrics that are displayed and are counted: reaction time (the fastest voter after an item was submitted) and total votes count. So it means that not only quantity of votes matters, but the time that passed after an item was submitted and user casts a vote before competition ends. Each month top rated voters get prizes and in the end of season top voter gets a grand prize.