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TikTok Tattoogate Artist: How a tattoo artist sparked backlash for ‘absurd’ pricing and design changes

By Aanchal Rao -

August 15, 2023

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“TikTok Tattoogate artist becomes super popular as TikTok Artist gets in trouble for changing designs.”

A TikTok tattoogate made a big fuss on TikTok because they wanted to charge a customer more money for changing a tattoo design. This caused a lot of attention online and is being called “TikTok Tattoogate artist.”

Tattoos have been talked about a lot, and even though they’ve been around for a long time, some people and places still find them kind of unusual.

A big talk about tattoos and tattoo artists is happening on TikTok. People are upset because an artist wanted more money from a customer for their design. Now, everyone is calling this situation “TikTok tattoogate artist.”

In This Article hide

1 What is ‘tattoo gate’ on TikTok

2 The extra charges were a choice

3 Fans come together to help

What is ‘tattoo gate’ on TikTok

On May 10th, a person on TikTok named Courtney Monteith shared three videos about her time with a tattoo artist. The artist added extra charges that Courtney didn’t know about, and the artist didn’t create the tattoo design she wanted.

Courtney tells everyone that she talked to a tattoo artist she liked on social media to get a fox tattoo. She gave $1,000 before the appointment, $85 for talking about the tattoo, and $1,600 more for the design.

Courtney told her audience that she was surprised when the artist offered her three options for design fees. The cheapest was $1,500 plus tax, which had a small change allowed. The most expensive was $6,000 plus tax, and it included many drawings with lots of changes to pick from.

“I thought the price would be subtracted from my total tattoo cost, but it wasn’t,” Courtney explained.

The extra charges were a choice

The TikTok Tattoogate artist sent Courtney an email saying, “The design collaboration is something you can choose to do. It’s for clients who want more say in the tattoo design and can give feedback and changes.”

Courtney asked the TikTok Tattoo gate artist to add this information to her website because she didn’t know about the added costs when she first talked about getting the tattoo. Later, the artist mentioned a fourth option without the design fee, which she didn’t tell Courtney about.

Courtney explained to her viewers, “I didn’t know I could choose whether to pay that fee or not. She gave me three choices and asked which one I liked. I should have left then, that’s my mistake.”

“But I think she should have explained better from the start. I didn’t know about option four. She never talked about it.”

To make things worse, Courtney also said the TikTok Tattoo gate artist didn’t understand what she wanted. The drawing she received, especially where the fox was placed, didn’t match the pictures she had given as examples. When Courtney said this, the artist said she didn’t like how the fox was positioned in the reference pictures.

Fans come together to help

After sharing the videos on May 10th, the first one got more than 4.4 million views, and the other two got around one million views each. Many people have shown their support for Courtney.

Someone wrote: “An TikTok Tattoogate artist who doesn’t want to make sure you really like the art that will be on your body forever is someone to stay away from.”

Another person said: “I’ve got tattoos on most of my body from TikTok Tattoogate artists all over the US and Canada – I never paid for a meeting.”

“I’ve never heard of something like this before! Amazing! Paying for a talk and then paying for a design that’s not even for the tattoo? Amazing,” a third person said.

This is not the first time tattoos have caused problems on the app. In February, a video became really popular where a woman shared her story about a messed-up tattoo design that made her cry.