Whether you’re a tattoo artist, a piercer or another type of body modification artist, it’s important to get the volume of business you want and need to sustain yourself. Working at a high-traffic tattoo and piercing shop may provide you with a steady inflow of clients, but if you want to expand your business further or aren’t getting the traffic you need, our Limitless Print & Design Center can help.
Our Limitless product line offers a wide variety of custom print marketing materials, custom merchandise featuring your artwork or graphics from our library that you can sell in addition to your services, and an extensive selection of custom advertising banners, signs and displays. Read on to learn how each type of custom product we offer can help you market yourself and your services so that you can grow your body modification business.
Limitless Custom Print Marketing Materials
Attractive, attention-grabbing print marketing materials should be a part of every tattoo and piercing artist’s advertising plan, and Limitless has the perfect assortment to help you promote yourself and your services. Choose from custom business cards in three styles and your choice of paper weights, custom letterhead and matching envelopes that can also be used with our custom cards when sending out event invites, custom flyers, postcards and brochures, and custom magnets, stickers and notepads that you can use as giveaways to make your name top-of-mind the next time someone you’ve met needs a tattoo artist, piercer or other body mod professional.
Here are just a few ideas for ways that you can use Limitless custom print marketing materials to promote yourself as a body modification artist:
Custom Referral Cards – Use our custom business cards to create referral cards with your name, contact info and a “Referred by” line. Give a couple to every client you tattoo or pierce, and invite them to share the cards with their friends. 
Include a discount for the recipient on your referral cards, and you’re certain to see a percentage of them return to your shop along with new business. Better yet, include a matching discount for the referrer when a card they’ve handed out makes its way back to you to increase return business as well as referral business.
Custom Business Cards – Keep a handful of business cards on you at all times, and pass them out whenever it’s appropriate. If someone asks you what you do for a living, share a card with them. If you’re networking at another shop, a tattoo convention or another body modification event, give a custom business card to everyone you speak to there. Keep a stack of cards at your workstation in a business card holder, and encourage clients and any friends accompanying them to take cards with them. Pin business cards to local bulletin boards at places like coffee shops and grocery stores.
Custom Brochures – Turn a brochure into a mini portfolio featuring your tattoo art, piercings or other body modifications. If you offer set prices or hourly rates, detail them in the brochure along with your name, contact info, web address, and/or social media links, or include a “Contact Me for Pricing” line if your prices fluctuate. Set out some of the brochures at your home shop for potential clients to pick up and peruse at their leisure. Buy a targeted mailing list from USPS, and send out brochures to everyone in your area who meets that criteria (Ex. households with residents age 18-40 with income of $75,000/year or more). If you’re planning to do a guest appearance at another shop, send some brochures to them a month or more ahead of your visit, and ask the shop to pass them out to clientele who may be interested in getting a tattoo, piercing or other body modification by you. Custom brochures are also a great thing to have at your convention booths so that curious passerby can pick them up and reach out to you if they’re interested in working with you later.
Custom Event Invitations – Use our custom cards to create unique invitations to upcoming events you’re participating in, like your home shop’s grand opening celebration, a “Celebrate Your Independence With a Body Mod” 4th of July promotion, a wine and cheese mixer for your clients, or any other excuse you can think of to rally people to gather and get modified on a particular day, weekend or week. Feature your artwork on the cover and a printed message inside each card, and mail them out in our custom envelopes printed with your name, shop name and return address.
Custom Flyers – Show people what you do and tell them how to find you with custom flyers featuring your artwork and contact info. Gather a few friends and spend an afternoon sliming cars in parking lots in your area. Go door-to-door and place a rolled-up flyer in between the door knob and jam at each house so that the flyer fills the space and stays put as it unrolls. (Note that it’s illegal to stuff mailboxes by hand, but you can put flyers on people’s doors as long as they don’t have “no soliciting” signs posted.) You can even mail custom flyers you’ve folded in thirds and stapled together on one side or sealed with a custom sticker to a targeted mailing list.
Custom Postcards – Use custom postcards to promote an event, a sale, or just your services in general. Send them out to people on a targeted mailing list via USPS, hand them out to shop visitors, or sell postcards that just feature your artwork to your clients and fans who visit your booth at a convention. When using postcards for a mailing, make sure to include your name and contact info prominently on the cards.
Custom Stickers & Custom Magnets – Stickers and magnets make some of the best promotional materials, because people are less likely to throw them out without a glance than flyers and other print marketing materials. Some people love putting stickers all over their laptops, lockers, binders, bike helmets, and anything else they can decorate, 
so why not make sure you and your artwork are in that mix of decorations? You can have custom stickers printed with tattoo designs and other graphic art you’ve created, or you can just include your name, phone number and website address in vibrant colors on a bright background. Do the same with magnets for another giveaway that people are sure to use and refer to later. Recipients can stick them to their refrigerators, cars, gym lockers, or anything else made of metal. Hand custom stickers and magnets out at your shop, on the street, at body mod conventions, and at shops where you’re doing guest appearances. If you’re feeling bold, you could even attach magnets to people’s cars in a local parking lot as a gorilla marketing tactic.
Custom Notepads – Decorate custom notepads with a background design featuring your tattoo art or other graphics you’ve created, and have your name, contact info, web address, and/or social media handles printed at the top or bottom of each sheet. Use your custom notepads to take notes during client interviews, give them away to your fans, or sell them in your shop and at conventions to increase your revenue.
Limitless Custom Banners, Signs & Displays
Custom signs, banners and displays are great tools for promoting yourself and your services attractively and in a manner that will grab people’s attention at a glance. If you own your own shop or lease a work space, you can promote your services on an A-frame sign, indoor or outdoor banner, poster stand, table top acrylic sign, back-lit sign, or perforated window film. Use these tools to announce your presence, let people know what you do, promote prices and specials, feature your artwork, and generally decorate your work area.
You can hang banners from your shop’s roof, on an inner wall of your shop, or from your convention booth walls or table. Custom signs also make great additions to convention booths as well as being solid advertising tools for both the inside and outside of your shop. If you’re looking for that extra special finishing touch for product displays in your store or at a convention, check out our custom table covers, acrylic displays and decals that you can affix to glass cases, shop windows, car windows, and more. You can even sell custom decals featuring your artwork to your clients or give them away as promotional freebies at conventions and other events.
Limitless Custom Merchandise
If you’re looking for an easy way to supplement your income from piercing, tattooing or performing other types of body modification, then you should absolutely check out our Limitless custom merchandise. We offer custom plugs, fake plugs, pendants, iPhone cases, belt buckles, stickers, magnets, greeting cards and envelopes, artist papers, canvas prints, posters, and decals that can all be personalized with your tattoo art, other graphic art or images from our extensive library. These personalized items will make awesome upsells for the front of your tattoo and piercing shop, your convention booth, and other events. They can make attending a community event worthwhile when you can’t modify onsite, because you can usually sell personalized items even when you can’t sell your actual services.
Personalized merchandise makes an especially great upsell for tattoo artists, because your fans will love the opportunity to buy products they can use regularly that feature your designs. If you aren’t comfortable buying an extensive assortment of custom plugs in different sizes or want to see if there’s interest in another product type before ordering it, offer to do on-demand orders for your fans. You can start a shopping cart, add personalized items in just the sizes and styles people want, and place an order daily, weekly or monthly to have your custom products drop-shipped to you for distribution. Alternatively, you can have custom posters, canvas prints, jewelry, phone cases, belt buckles, artist papers, and other personalized products shipped directly to your clients if you place one order for each person who wants your custom merch. 
It’s best to buy custom magnets, stickers and decals in bulk, though, so you always have a supply on hand to give away or sell whenever you want.
Designing Your Custom Marketing Materials & Merchandise
When it comes to designing personalized merchandise, custom stationary, banners, displays, and other custom marketing materials, you have options. You can either create your designs yourself using our Limitless product templates and your preferred graphic design program, or we can create designs for you. If you’d like us to do the heavy lifting, email our Graphics Department about the work you want done, and we’ll estimate how much time it will take us. You can then add one of our Hourly Rate options to cart for each hour you need our services and pay for us to design your custom marketing materials and merchandise for you when you order your custom products.
To design your own custom marketing materials and personalized merchandise, first decide which products you want to order. Next, visit our Product Templates page and click on the type of product you’re ordering to see all available template options. Download your preferred file type (PDF, EPS or AI), and open it in your graphic design software program. When using software programs like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to create your designs, it’s important to make sure the DPI (dots per inch) setting is 300. A lower resolution may not print out as sharply as you’d like. If you need help understanding photo image sizes or printing color options, check out our helpful Understanding Photo Image Sizes and Printing Color: What Does 4:0, 4:1, and 4:4 Mean? articles. We also have an article about understanding paper weights in our Print & Design Info Center, as well as informative articles about the different types of custom products we offer and how to personalize each one.
Once your design templates are ready to go, place an order for the products you want us to customize for you. Unless the product detail pages explicitly tell you to upload your graphics on page, you’ll need to email your graphic files to us at support@painfulpleasures.com, Attn: Graphics Department, after placing your order. Extremely large files may need to be uploaded via our FTP site; you can email us for instructions, or check out our How to Send Us Your Files article. Please allow up to a week for us to manufacture your custom products and ship them out to you.
