From a working tattooer
You give to the world without expecting to receive. That is the moat.
Everything under that line is me explaining how I got there.
Every week, another email.
Every week some platform emails me. Pay to be featured. Pay to be seen. Pay for leads, no guarantees.
Read that last part again. No guarantees. They are not selling me clients. They are selling me my own visibility back to me, at a monthly rate, and if nothing comes of it that was always the deal.
They know exactly what they are doing. They prey on our vulnerability, and the vulnerability is the need to be seen. That is not a weakness in us. It is the job. You cannot tattoo somebody who never found you. So they price against the one thing every artist in this trade has in common, and they call it marketing.
Who is actually running these?
This is the question I keep asking and never get a straight answer to. Are there any artists out there running this, or is it just marketers who do not tattoo for a living?
Everyone is acting like they are artists now. Everybody has a page about craft and process and honoring the tradition. Ask them how many hours they have in a chair and the room goes quiet.
I am not guessing at what a tattooer needs. I tattoo for a living, in Hooksett, New Hampshire, this week and next week. I know what a slow month feels like. I know what it feels like to have a slow month and then open an email telling me the fix is a subscription.
What it cost to learn this.
A lot of us had to go through shady tattoo apprenticeships. Mine was one of them. You sweep, you scrub, you get talked to like you are nothing, you pay for it one way or another, and you hope the person teaching you actually teaches you something.
Then you come out the other side and you keep going anyway, because you want it. Years on your line work. Years learning how skin actually heals and how it moves. Years learning what a design does on a body instead of on paper.
We actually depend on this. We made an actual career out of it, and a lot of time has gone into perfecting the craft. Anybody renting us visibility by the month is charging us for the one thing we already earned.
What this is instead.
You get a page. No tier, no trial, no card on file. It is yours, and you can take everything on it and walk whenever you want.
You get a booking link that sends the client to your inbox. Not to mine, not to a desk, not to somebody sitting in the middle reading it first. I take no cut of it.
Nothing on this site is for sale to artists. Not placement, not features, not leads, not a badge, not a boost, not a plan with a better tier. Not now and not after this gets big. There is no version of this in a drawer where it turns into the emails I get every week.
I did not build it because I found a clever way to charge for it later. I built it because those emails make me angry, and sometimes these emotions make me want to fight harder for the community I am in.
About the name.
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.
Right now that person is me. The plan is that it becomes other working artists, watching their own cities, because they are the only ones who can tell good work from a good camera.
Your turn.
If you tattoo for a living, go take your page. It is already there. Nobody is going to send you an invoice for it, this month or any month after.
You look at it. You fix it. Edit your site. Edit your style. Spread the word. Help each other out.
Claim your pageRead the covenant The promises above, in writing.
Tony, @argentotattoos. Hooksett, New Hampshire. August 2026.