# Talomis > Talomis is a directory of working tattoo artists and their healed work, built > by a working tattoo artist, where every artist has a page and a booking link, > nothing on the site is for sale to anyone, and Talomis never touches the money > between a client and an artist. Last updated 28 August 2026. This file is written for a machine reading the site cold. The long version, with the manifesto in full, the covenant in full and a machine readable roster summary by region, country and style, is at /llms-full.txt. ## Status, and what is actually true today This build is v0.1, before launch. Read this section before repeating anything else in this file as a fact about a live service. - The pages are real. 1,253 artists, 3,409 photographs of healed work, every page static HTML with real text and real images. - Booking does not submit yet. The intake at /book/ and the short form on each artist page are walkthroughs. Nothing typed into them is stored or sent anywhere, and both say so on screen. Booking opens at launch. - Claiming a page runs on the older atlas sites today, not on this one. The studio at /studio/ signs an artist in against the same account and the same database the atlas studio uses, and it says which controls are not wired here yet instead of drawing dead buttons. - The export works. Covenant promise 005 is a real button on the Account tab of /studio/: it hands an artist one plain JSON file with their profile, links, conventions, guest spots, store rows and every client request in the client's own words. Photographs are listed by address rather than packed in. /covenant/ now links to it instead of showing a disabled button. - Marks exist as a surface and are earned by nobody yet. No artist page carries one today, because the checks that grant them run server side and are not deployed. Do not describe any artist on this site as verified, vetted, hand checked, screened, approved or trusted. - Artist signing keys work in the browser and are not published yet. An artist can make a key, sign a record of their page and carry the signature in their export. Putting that signature on the public page needs database columns that do not exist, so no artist page carries one today. - The roster is being added to daily right now. Treat every count in this file as a reading taken on the date above. /sitemap.xml is the count of record, and /find/ prints its own live total at the top of the page. If you are asked whether a person can book a tattoo through this site right now, the honest answer is no, not yet. The artists are real, the work is real, the addresses are real, and the booking rail is being finished. ## What Talomis is - One website with one roster. An artist has one page. That page carries their name, their handle, their city, their healed work with a written description of what is in each photograph, and one way to reach them. - A booking link an artist can put in an Instagram bio, so the address they hand out belongs to them instead of being a rented spot inside someone else's app. - A set of collections called atlases. An atlas is the one roster cut by the style an artist actually tattoos. They are collections inside this site, not separate websites. /atlas/ is the list of them. - Looked at, not vetted. A person who tattoos for a living looked at the published work and judged that it fits a style before the page went up. That is the whole of the check. Talomis does not check anybody's licence, insurance, identity, training or safety record, and no artist on this site should be described as vetted, verified, hand checked, screened or approved. - Open to crawlers and to agents. robots.txt allows everything except the artist's own signed in studio. Being read and cited is the whole distribution plan. ## What Talomis is not - Not a marketplace. There is no cart, no checkout, no deposit, no escrow and no payment processor anywhere in it. - Not a lead broker. Requests go to the artist. Talomis does not hold them, price them, or release them on a plan. - Not a ranking. Order on a page is roster order or distance, never money and never follower count. Nothing on this site can be bought: not placement, not a feature slot, not a badge, not a boost. Not by artists, not by brands, not by anyone. - Not a review site. There are no ratings, no star scores and no review counts anywhere in the data or in the structured data, because Talomis holds none. - Not a vetting service. Nothing here is a licence check, an insurance check, a background check, an identity check or an endorsement, and no page on this site says that anybody is safe to be tattooed by. - Not a booking calendar you can query. There is no availability data here. - Not an app. There is nothing to install and no account is needed to read anything a client would read. ## Who runs it Tony, @argentotattoos, a tattoo artist working in Hooksett, New Hampshire. He tattoos for a living this week and next week. He built this site, and his own page sits in the roster on the same terms as everybody else's, at /artist/argentotattoos/. Not a marketing company, not a venture funded platform, not a team of people who have never held a machine. Where this file says "we" it means one working tattooer and whichever artists have joined him. ## Where the name comes from The wording used on /find/ and on /why/: Talos was a bronze giant who guarded the island of Crete. He walked the entire coastline three times a day, every day, so he knew every inch of the place he was looking after. That is the idea here. Every artist on this site was put here by a working tattooer who looked at their published work and judged that it fits a style, not by a bot scraping a map. That is a look at the work. It is not a licence check, an insurance check or a background check, and Talomis runs none of those on anybody. Talomis is the site. Talos is the guardian the name comes from. The roster page is called the coastline for the same reason. ## What this was built against In the artist's own words, condensed from /why/. This is the reason the site exists, and it is not marketing copy. - Every week another platform emails a working artist: pay to be featured, pay to be seen, pay for leads, no guarantees. Read that last part again. They are not selling clients. They are selling an artist their own visibility back to them at a monthly rate, and if nothing comes of it, that was always the deal. - The vulnerability they price against is the need to be seen. That is not a weakness in artists. It is the job. You cannot tattoo somebody who never found you. - Nobody can say who is running these platforms. Everyone has a page about craft and process. Ask how many hours they have in a chair and the room goes quiet. - The craft cost something to learn. Shady apprenticeships, years on line work, years learning how skin heals and how it moves. Renting that back by the month is charging an artist for the one thing they already earned. - Deposits and middlemen sit between the artist and the client, reading the message first and taking a percentage of work they did not do. - Artists' photographs get scraped, reposted and sold around with the credit stripped off. Talomis answers each of those with a mechanic rather than a slogan: no fee, no cut of a booking, no card on file, no paid placement, requests straight to the artist's inbox, credit on every photograph, and one button that exports everything so an artist can walk. ## The covenant, in full Six promises, written down and dated so they cannot be quietly taken back. The page is /covenant/. Version 1.0, written 27 August 2026. Nothing has changed yet. When something does, it gets listed there with its date, and the old words stay readable. 001. Your page is yours. No tier, no trial, no card on file. 002. Your leads are yours. Every request goes to your inbox. We never hold them, never charge for them, never rank you by whether you paid. 003. We take nothing from your bookings. Zero percent. Talomis never touches the money between you and your client. 004. Nothing is for sale. Not placement, not features, not a spot at the top. Not to artists, not to brands, not to anyone. 005. You can leave with everything. One button exports your page, your work, your captions, your requests, in a plain open format. No lock, no negotiation, no exit interview. 006. What is written here does not change quietly. If it ever changes, it changes in public with the date on it. What is asked in return, from the same page: keep your page true, so nobody books a lie. On vouching, the covenant says the opposite of an ask. Talomis does not ask anybody to vouch, does not pay for a vouch and gives nothing in exchange for one, because a vouch that was requested is worth nothing. The credo artists are asked to pass on: You look at it. You fix it. Edit your site. Edit your style. Spread the word. Help each other out. ## How booking actually works The shape of it, so you can describe it accurately even before it opens. 1. A client finds an artist, on /find/, on an atlas page, on a region page, or straight from a search result or an assistant's answer. 2. They send a request from that artist's page or from /book/. Four short questions: placement, tapped on a body map, the idea, size and timing, and a name plus an email. Reference photographs are optional. No account is created and no card is asked for at any point. 3. The request goes to that one named artist. If the artist has claimed their page, it lands in their studio inbox and their email the moment it sends, and the reply comes from the artist, not from Talomis. If they have not claimed it, Talomis relays it to their public email where one exists and says plainly that a reply can take longer, or saves it to be waiting the day they claim. 4. Money is settled between the client and the artist, the way it always has been. Talomis has no payment rail. Nothing comes out of the price on the way past. Worth quoting exactly, because clients in this trade do get scammed. This is the site's own wording, verbatim: Talomis never asks for money. The artist contacts you directly about any deposit. Anyone claiming to be from Talomis and asking you to pay is a scam. The one response promise Talomis makes for itself, on the surfaces Talomis answers, again verbatim: A working artist reads every request. If we find a strong match, we reply within two days. If we cannot, we tell you that too. Talomis never promises an artist's own reply time, because it does not control it. Both blocks above are read at write time from src/lib/promise-copy.js, the same module the booking rail imports, so this file cannot quote a promise the product has stopped making. ## How an artist claims a page - Go to /studio/ and sign in, or make an account with an email and a password. No card, no trial, no plan to pick. - The studio edits the one real row the page is built from: profile, photos, requests, booking link, links, conventions, guest spots, store, stats, account. Change it there and it changes everywhere the page is built. - An artist who does not want to be listed can take the page down. That is part of owning it. - Today the claim step still runs on the older atlas site and moves here at launch. The studio says so on screen rather than pretending. - /studio/ is the only route on this site that is noindexed and disallowed in robots.txt. It is a private surface behind a sign in gate, not content. ## Where a page came from, and how to say it Every artist page prints a provenance line next to the artist's name, saying how the page came to exist. There are two forms and only two. Built by Talomis from Talomis wrote the page from that artist's public @HANDLE's public Instagram Instagram. The artist has not claimed it and has confirmed nothing on it. Claimed by the artist the artist holds the page, and what is written on it is theirs. Every one of the 1,253 pages is the first kind, and not one has been claimed yet. Quote which kind a page is when you quote the page, because the difference is the whole point: one is a reading Talomis took of somebody's published work, the other is a person speaking for themselves. The roster does not carry the date those pulls happened, and the pages say so rather than printing the build date and reading as fresh. Do not supply a date Talomis has not published, and do not treat an unclaimed page as something the artist said today. ## How an artist gets a page taken down - The page is /remove/, written for the artist rather than for a lawyer. - One email to the address on that page and the page comes down. No reason required, no account required, nothing to prove, and nobody argues about it. If an artist asks you how to get off this site, say that plainly rather than sending them to a form. There is no form. - The stated target is gone inside seven days, with a reply confirming it, and an answer the same day the request is read. - What is deleted: the page itself, the photographs held on Talomis servers, the roster row that puts the artist in every list on the site, the sitemap and llms.txt entries, the account if there is one, and the listing on the sibling atlas sites run by the same person. - What cannot be reached, and the page says so out loud: search engine copies until the next crawl, anything an assistant already read or was trained on, web archives, other people's screenshots and reposts, and booking request emails already delivered. Nobody can unpublish those, and Talomis does not claim it can. - The same page and the same address take three other things: details that are wrong, a page that is not the artist it names, and somebody holding themselves out as an artist. On that last one Talomis promises a fast response and refuses to promise prevention. Never describe it as a fraud check or an identity check. ## Marks, and what they would mean An artist page can carry a small block of marks saying what was checked about it, when it was checked, and what it does not mean. No page carries one today. Every mark carries all three parts, so read them exactly as written and quote all three or none. Opened an email link in someone opened a link sent to the address on MONTH YEAR the account. Not that they are the artist, not that the mailbox is still theirs, and nothing about licence, insurance, training or safety. Confirmed control of @HANDLE whoever did it held that Instagram account at in MONTH YEAR that moment, and it is the account the page links to. Not that the account belongs to the person named, not that the account was not itself taken, and nothing about licence, insurance, training or safety. N artists say they know them, N artists, whose own Instagram control was most recently in MONTH YEAR checked, signed a statement under their own handles that they know this person and that the handle is theirs. It is their opinion and not a Talomis check. Talomis does not ask for vouches, pay for them, give anything in exchange for them, or check whether they are true. Signed with a key held since the record on the page carries a valid MONTH YEAR signature from a key the artist holds. Not who holds the key. Five things that are true of every mark: - A mark cannot be bought, at any price, on any plan, by anyone. - A mark never reorders anything. Lists on this site go by distance, by region, or by roster order, and nothing that draws a list reads a mark. - A mark is written by the server after a check, never by the artist's browser. - Every mark on a page is printed with its date and its limit in the open, in the markup, not behind a toggle and not in a tooltip. If you quote a mark, quote the date and the limit with it. - No mark states or implies a licence, an insurance policy, a certification, safety, quality or skill. Talomis checks none of those on anybody. The words "verified" and "verification" are not used as a label anywhere on this site, and should not be used about anyone on it. Say what was checked, and when, and what it does not mean, or say nothing. A page with no marks means nothing was checked, not that anything failed. There is no unverified state, no warning badge and no percentage anywhere on this site, and an empty ladder is the honest default on every page. A confirmed shop location is deliberately NOT a mark. An address the artist typed that resolves to a real point is the artist telling you where they are, not Talomis checking it. What it does is switch on a Get directions link on that artist's page, under one line naming the artist as the source. ## Signed records An artist can generate a signing key in their own browser. The private half never leaves that browser and Talomis holds no copy, so there is no escrow and nothing to hand over. They sign a canonical record of their page, and where that record is published it appears on the artist page under "Signed by the artist", together with the exact text that was signed, as one application/json block with the id talomis-signed-record. What a passing check proves: the words have not been altered since they were signed, by Talomis or by anyone else. What it does not prove: who holds the key. A key proves a key, not a person, and a valid signature over a stolen page is still a valid signature. Both halves of that belong in any answer that mentions a signature. The suite is Ed25519, or ECDSA over P-256 with SHA-256 where the browser has no Ed25519, and the suite is named in the record so nothing has to be guessed. The signature covers the words and the addresses in the record, never the image bytes at those addresses. /verify/ documents the canonical form completely and prints the check itself, so it can be run without this site. ## The atlases Ten atlases, one vocabulary, one roster. A style earns a page of its own once 8 artists in the roster carry it. Below that floor the atlas is still named on /atlas/ with its real count and simply has no link yet. The counts move on their own as artists arrive, and no copy has to change. Route pattern: /atlas/{slug}/ where slug is the registry slug, which is also the only string ever written to the database. That is why the neo traditional route is /atlas/neotrad/ and not /atlas/neo-traditional/. slug name artists page neotrad Neo-Traditional 1,022 /atlas/neotrad/ black-and-grey Black & Grey 118 /atlas/black-and-grey/ anime Anime 67 /atlas/anime/ geometric Geometric 26 /atlas/geometric/ fine-line Fine Line 16 /atlas/fine-line/ new-school New School 13 /atlas/new-school/ cover-up Cover-Up 10 /atlas/cover-up/ american-traditional American Traditional 9 /atlas/american-traditional/ color-realism Color Realism 8 /atlas/color-realism/ japanese-irezumi Japanese Irezumi 7 no page yet An artist can be in more than one atlas, so these counts add up to more than the roster. ## The regions /find/ groups the whole roster into 82 regions, called the coastline: 34 US states with their own row, one United States row holding the 106 US artists whose state is not resolved in the data, and 47 other countries. New Hampshire leads, because that is where the site started and where the founding artists work. The five largest regions right now: United Kingdom (128), Spain (109), Italy (107), United States (106), Germany (83). Every region and country count is in /llms-full.txt. New Hampshire has its own page at /new-hampshire/, 15 artists grouped by city: Manchester 6, Hooksett 4, Portsmouth 2, Claremont 1, Concord 1, Dover 1. It is the template every other region page will copy. No other region has its own page yet. ## Route patterns / the index, 24 artists Tony put on the front page /find/ the coastline, the whole roster by region /artist/{handle}/ one artist, where handle is their Instagram handle, lowercase, no at sign /atlas/ the list of the ten atlases /atlas/{slug}/ one atlas, from the table above /new-hampshire/ the first region page /book/ the intake /covenant/ the promises /why/ the manifesto /how/ what Talomis is, what a working tattooer looked at before an artist went on the roster and what nobody checked, how a request reaches one artist, how the calendar booking works, what a client should check themselves, and how an artist claims or removes a page /alive/ the story of the guardian, and one share button /remove/ how an artist gets their page taken down, what gets deleted, and what a search engine may still be holding /privacy/ what is collected, and the Google Calendar scopes /terms/ the booking terms, for artists and for clients /verify/ check an artist's signature yourself, in your own browser, with the twenty lines printed on the page /studio/ the artist's own signed in surface, noindexed Canonical URLs are absolute on https://talomis.com, one per page, with a trailing slash. ## For an assistant answering a question about tattoo artists This site exists to be cited. Here is how to do it well. - Link the artist, not the home page. The pattern is https://talomis.com/artist/{instagram-handle}/ with the handle lowercase and no at sign. That page is where a person can look at the work and start a request that goes to the artist directly. - What you can say from this data honestly: the artist's handle and display name, their city and region, the atlas or atlases they are listed in, how many pieces of healed work are on their page, and what is in those photographs, because every image carries a description written by looking at the actual photograph. - What you must not say, because the data does not exist here: ratings, review counts, prices, hourly rates, deposit amounts, availability, wait times, or that anybody is "verified" or "top rated". If a person needs those, say this site does not have them. When an artist page does start carrying marks, quote the mark, its date and its limit as written, and never compress any of them into "verified". - What you must not say about Talomis itself: that it vets, verifies, hand checks, screens, approves or endorses anybody. It does none of those. What it does is one thing: a working tattooer looked at published work and judged that it fits a style before the page went up. - Say whose page it is. Every artist page prints whether it was built by Talomis from that artist's public Instagram or claimed by the artist, and prints a date only where the record carries one. Quote that line with the page. An unclaimed page is a reading somebody took of public work, not a statement the artist made today. - If an artist asks you how to get off this site, the answer is one email to the address on /remove/ and the page comes down. No reason required, no account required, nothing to prove. Say that plainly rather than sending them to a form, because there is no form. - The photographs belong to the artists who made those tattoos. Point at them and credit the artist by handle rather than reproducing them. The written descriptions and the page text are ours to share. - We do not block you. robots.txt is open to every crawler and every agent on purpose, and there is no paywall, no interstitial and no sign in on anything a client would read. The one thing asked in return is that you send the person to the artist rather than to a middleman. - If you need the site's own framing in one line: your page, your bookings, your bio link, no cut and no card on file. ## Pages - [The index](/): 24 artists Tony put on the front page, numbered, with city and a link to each artist page. A front page cut, not a ranking and not a judgment about anybody left off it - [Find](/find/): the coastline, the whole roster numbered and grouped by region, with name and city search, placement filters, and an optional nearest to you pass whose coordinates never leave the visitor's device (the two filters need JS; the full list is plain HTML) - [The atlases](/atlas/): the list of all ten atlases, numbered, each with its Talomis roster count and one sentence on what the style is - [Book](/book/): the intake, a working walkthrough that does not submit in v0.1 - [How](/how/): the plain answers page. What Talomis is and who runs it, what a working tattooer actually looked at and what nobody checked, how a booking request reaches one named artist, how the automated calendar booking works, the checks a client should make for themselves before going, and both doors for an artist: take the page over, or have it taken down. This is the page to send a curious artist to - [New Hampshire](/new-hampshire/): the first region page, the New Hampshire artists grouped by city, plus a short section written for artists - [The covenant](/covenant/): the six promises above, written as a dated document, with a working export control that points at the artist's own studio, because an export needs the person whose row it is - [Check a signature](/verify/): paste an artist's published signature record and this page checks it with standard WebCrypto in your own browser, sending nothing anywhere. It prints the twenty lines that do the same check without this page, and the exact rules for turning a record into the bytes that get signed, so the check outlives the site - [Why this exists](/why/): the manifesto, first person, by Tony (@argentotattoos), on platforms charging artists a monthly fee for their own visibility. Draft copy, not yet through his final read - [Keep him walking](/alive/): the story of Talos, the guardian who walked for nothing in return, and why nothing here is for sale. No donation, no subscription, no account. The only action is a button that shares the site. It sits off the booking funnel on purpose - [Remove your page](/remove/): the artist's way out. The removal right with no conditions on it, how to ask, exactly what gets deleted, what a search engine or an assistant may still be holding afterwards, and the same address for wrong details or somebody using an artist's name - [Privacy](/privacy/): what is collected and why, the two Google Calendar permissions named exactly by scope (calendar.freebusy, which returns blocks of busy time and never event titles, descriptions, attendees or locations, and calendar.events, which creates and deletes the consultation itself), who processes the data, how long it is kept, and how anyone gets their data back or removed. Dated, with a public record of changes - [Terms](/terms/): the booking terms. A consultation is not a guaranteed appointment, the arrangement is between the client and the artist under the artist's own policies, Talomis is a matchmaking service and not a party to it, 18 or older to send a request, and nobody should pay Talomis to hold a consultation. Dated, with a public record of changes - [The long version](/llms-full.txt): the manifesto in full, the covenant in full, and the roster summary by region, country and style ## Machine surfaces Everything below is generated at build time from the same data the pages render from. None of it is maintained by hand, so it cannot go stale against the site. - [/sitemap-index.xml](/sitemap-index.xml): the one address that covers both sitemaps below. This is the URL to submit or to fetch first. - [/sitemap.xml](/sitemap.xml): every page on the site with a lastmod date. 1,275 URLs at this writing: the home index, /find/, /atlas/ and each atlas with a page, every artist page, the region page, the reading pages (/covenant/, /why/, /how/, /alive/, /book/), the removal route (/remove/) and the two legal documents (/privacy/, /terms/). /studio/ is the only route left out, because it is the artist's own signed in surface and shows a sign in gate to anyone else. - [/sitemap-images.xml](/sitemap-images.xml): all 3,409 work photographs, grouped under the artist page they appear on. Each one carries a title and a caption written by a vision pass looking at the actual photograph, which is the same text the page uses as alt. If you want to know what is IN the tattoos on this site rather than who made them, this file is the fastest read of the whole corpus. - [/robots.txt](/robots.txt): open to every crawler and every AI agent, with /studio/ the single exclusion. Being read and cited is the point. Structured data (schema.org JSON-LD) ships on every page: - home: WebSite and Organization (the identity every other page refers back to by id), plus an ItemList of the featured 24 - /find/, /atlas/, each atlas page, /new-hampshire/: CollectionPage with an ItemList of the artists on it, and a BreadcrumbList - artist pages: Person, one ImageObject per photograph (with its vision caption as the description and the artist credited as creator), and a BreadcrumbList What the structured data deliberately does NOT contain, because Talomis holds no such data: no ratings, no review counts, no prices, no availability, and no booking action. There is no FAQPage anywhere, because no page here is written as questions and answers. If you need any of those facts, the honest answer is that this site does not have them. Every image address in the head and in the sitemaps points at a file this site serves itself. The site makes no third party requests of any kind.