Studio · Est. 2026 · Seattle, WA
We build for the tattoo artist. The hours in complex work go to stencil prep — paper redraws, on-skin retracing, fitting flat designs to curved limbs. Capture the limb on iPhone Pro LiDAR, place the design on the actual three-dimensional surface, and pull a stencil that fits the first time. Less time at the lightbox, more time at the machine.
Our mission
Every tattoo lives on a curve. For decades, artists have closed the gap between flat reference designs and three-dimensional bodies with intuition, tracing paper, and a willingness to reshoot.
NextTat replaces that gap with a tool: a precise iPhone-native 3D scan of the exact body part, a designer that respects anatomy, and a preview the client can actually believe. Built by an international tattoo artist and a senior ML engineer who think the craft deserves software as serious as it is.
What we do
We fuse the iPhone Pro LiDAR depth signal with high-resolution photo frames in real time, then hand the combined data to Apple’s Object Capture pipeline for reconstruction. Wrist, ribs, calf, sternum, full sleeve — all on the phone you already carry.
Pull your reference art into the scan and project it onto the actual skin geometry. See where a clavicle interrupts a script, where a calf swells under a line, where the work needs to bias for healing. The flat reference can’t tell you any of this.
Hand the iPhone to the client. They see the tattoo on their own body, rotating in 3D. No stencil-on-skin leap of faith — just a faithful preview built from their own geometry. Export the preview as USDZ to share, or as a still for their notes.
Why now
Skin isn’t flat. The reference is. That’s the whole problem.
Apple shipped LiDAR on every Pro iPhone in 2020 and put on-device Object Capture in iOS 17. Five years of consumer-grade depth sensing have been waiting for a craft worth pointing it at.
The tattoo industry is exactly that craft — high stakes, deeply personal, permanently on the canvas, and still running on tools designed for paper. NextTat is the studio building software for the way the work actually happens.
For artists, studios, and the people they tattoo
Replace stencils-and-Sharpies with a ten-minute scan-and-preview that respects the artist’s flow and converts more bookings. Multi-artist accounts, shared scan libraries, MDM provisioning.
Capture, compose, preview, export — on the iPhone you already use. No new subscription stack, no new file format you can’t open elsewhere. USDZ and OBJ from day one.
Building a campaign that touches the tattoo community? We collaborate on creative activations, events, and experiences where contemporary aesthetics meet the craft. Get in touch.
Get in touch
We’re running closed studio pilots in Seattle through summer 2026. Public TestFlight follows. Brand and technical partnerships are open now.