The Mind Your Ink Platform

Sarah Micheletti

Jan. 4, 2025

Client Experience

Mind Your Ink Platform

A high-level look at how Mind Your Ink functions as a platform (as of writing). While we’d love for you to use it as a tool in your sustainable business toolbox, if now’s not the right time to invest in a subscription, read this post to figure out how you can cobble together a process that gets closer to it by using our core strategy and approach to tattoo booking admin.

Stay organized via multiple books

While having multiple books may seem like more work, it actually helps you stay more organized by knowing which request is for what. We recommend having booking windows for:

• Your “home” shop/studio (continuously open or open/close by month)
• Any special flash days (Friday the 13th, Pride, Valentine’s, etc)
• Guest spots
• Conventions or special events

Within Mind Your Ink, each booking window can then have unique availability (dates, days of the week, and times of day), location details, deposit/reschedule/cancellation agreements, payment instructions, settings for what you’re booking (flash, custom, both, etc), and day-of appointment details. This allows you to be way more specific and detailed for clients, easing any anxiety or confusion while setting appropriate boundaries.

Even with multiple booking windows, you’ll always have a single url to send clients to, your main artist booking page. This makes it simpler to keep your links up to date across platforms (Instagram, link tree, personal websites, etc).

Streamline requests via booking form

As Meta continues to change their apps constantly, relying on DMs to receive client requests is risky business. And no matter how hard you try, it’s unlikely that the majority of clients will perfectly nail all the pieces of info you request they send via an email reach out (or you’ll have to reduce it to so little info that you’ll inevitably have to follow up asking for more). To combat this, we learned from multiple tattoo artists out there that forms are the way to go.

We focus on collecting info in 3 categories: client information, tattoo details, and client availability. Client information includes essentials like their name, email/phone, consent to any policies, along with other helpful information to improve the client experience like max budget, pronouns, whether they’re a returning client. Tattoo details are straightforward: what it is, placement, size, and reference photos. Lastly, we collect their availability in relation to yours like days and times of the week, any unavailable dates, and whether (and when) they’re traveling.

Having all the information you need at the start is a huge timesaver, and while not exciting, forms get it done.

Get clients booked via smart request review

In any booking process, there’s at minimum three decisions you need to make: do you want to do the tattoo, how long will it take, and when do you want to do it. We add on a few more (in a quick, easy way): providing a cost estimate, and optionally adding an acceptance condition, custom note, and/or waiving the deposit. If you don’t currently provide cost estimates, we highly encourage it to help with client expectations. Adding an acceptance condition allows you to cut down on back-and-forth, providing a client with an explanation when proposing a time and date to them and requesting a deposit if they agree. Optional custom notes help you still keep a personal touch since again, we’re trying to cut down on back-and-forth communication for efficiency. And waiving a deposit probably won’t happen often, but is helpful to change the booking flow for a returning client, friends, a trade, or other situation.

Collect deposits via any platform

If you aren’t collecting deposits currently, we highly recommend it. It creates a level of accountability from clients in reserving your time. You should always have a policy around how deposits work, are applied, and are collected. Through Mind Your Ink, we allow you to link out to any payment platform of your choice to collect a deposit, and on the appointment detail page, you can mark whether its paid or not which will trigger auto emails letting clients know you received it (or remind them to pay it). Check out our post on policies for some good examples from Mind Your Ink artists.

Cut down on no-shows and ease client anxiety via reminders

We send out 72 hour and day-of appointment reminders that include your address, the cost and time estimates, a reiteration of your deposit/reschedule/cancellation policy, and any custom day-of content you want to share. We've found that 72 hours in advance helps capture situations where clients get sick or have last minute change of plans, allowing you time to get someone else in for that time slot last-minute.

We recommend focusing your day-of content on any policies you have around payment or guests, parking and location suggestions like how to get into your studio, and advice on what to eat/drink/consume (or not) beforehand.

We’ve got way more to Mind Your Ink than just what we mentioned above (like Google Calendar integration, quick follow-up appointment scheduling, shop pages, and more), but this is at a very very high level the flow. Feel free to steal some ideas for your own process, and when you’re ready for our platform magic, schedule a demo to see it live and dive deeper.

Questions? Comments? We don’t have the fancy ability to do that on the blog yet, but feel free to email via our contact link or DM on insta 👋