Tattoo artists beset by requests for unworkable AI pieces By: Ben Waldman Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Wednesday, Jun. 24, 2026 Last Modified: 8:58 PM CDT Wednesday, Jun. 24, 2026 Updates

As a professional tattooist with eight years of ink on her fingers, Justine Proulx is used to getting all sorts of requests from clients looking to decorate their bodies with memories, tributes and reminders.

But over the past six months, the Winnipeg artist, who works out of Black Thistle Tattoo, has noticed some troublesome trends.

Most — about 90 per cent — of clients are bringing in AI-generated images that “aren’t doable” to Proulx’s Henderson Highway studio.

Not only do these prompts undermine the artist’s hard-won style, but such images don’t account for the technical expertise of experienced tattooists, who have worked for years to understand the intricacies, the possibilities and the limitations of a dermal canvas.

That’s been a challenge for thousands of creatives and designers across disciplines since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT and subsequent generative AI programs, such as Google’s Gemini.

But for Proulx — an Indigenous artist who also creates traditional murals across the province in a modified Woodlands style — the deleterious effects of artificial intelligence upon her artistic practice run deeper.

Some prospective clients — whom Proulx takes care not to malign or name — are taking images from her website and feeding them into AI models, which then chew up Proulx’s original style and spit out an ersatz imitation.

“Instead of just saying to me, ‘Oh, I want a wolf tattoo with some sage,’ instead of verbally telling me that this is what they’re doing, they’re taking a picture of a wolf tattoo that I already did on somebody’s body. So they’re also taking images of people’s bodies off my Instagram, right?” says Proulx, whose most prominent public art work, installed in 2025, is a seasonal cycle of mammalian murals on the northern side of the RBC Convention Centre.

“I opened my books a couple of weeks ago and had not just one, but multiple people do that. I don’t think anybody has ill intent, obviously,” adds Proulx, whose widely shared Intagram post about the issue has been viewed thousands of times since June 16.

“I would say there’s not a huge divide within the tattoo community. Like 99 per cent of the people I talk to hate generative AI, but yeah, people really do think they’re saving us time and being helpful.”

Bram Adey, a tattooist who owns Ritual Winnipeg on Arthur Street, gives kudos to Proulx for publicly discussing a growing concern within the industry. As an advocate for all things analogue and a veteran artist, Adey had largely been insulated from AI in the industry until mid-June.

“In the last week-and-a-half, I’ve got a whole flood of AI-generated images in my inbox,” says Adey, who has been tattooing since 2010.

Adey says it’s common that prospective clients send references of other artists’ work to their hired tattooists, requesting that the artist work in another’s style.

“I’d say this feels roughly the same as that. It’s not a good starting point for us, and I think it has to do with expectations,” Adey says. “As someone who has worked for many years to develop a style or a visual language, when someone sends you another person’s tattoo or a tattoo design generated by a computer, it sets us off on bad footing.”

If Adey’s sent another tattoo artist’s design, Adey can take it as a starting point, but discards the original almost immediately.

“Usually what I do is look at it, look away, and make a sketch of my own. I need to distance myself from the (sent image) as much as possible right away.”

With AI-generated images, Adey agrees with Proulx that the “doability” isn’t taken into account.

“Tattooing itself is a very specific artform with very real and complex limitations. It’s our job as tattooers to be knowledgable about what we’re working with craft-wise and creating designs within those parameters. If you’ve found an artist whose work you like, they don’t need a ton from you,” Adey says.

“A client coming to me does not need to give me a visual: they can simply say I want a bison skull with crocuses on my shoulder, about this big, and that’s well enough.”

Clients may think they’re saving the designer time or effort, but that expert labour is what the person getting a tattoo signs up for, says Proulx, who loves the design-generation stage.

From a moral standpoint, the artist also has qualms with the environmental cost of using AI to generate Proulxian imagery.

“That’s one more thing that pisses me off (about generative AI),” says Proulx. “It’s just destroying the environment. There’s no ethical way to use it.”

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