On Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, our senior producer Maggie Nye rolled up her jacket sleeve to indicate me her latest tattoo: a classic pixelated cursor arrow. TechCrunch’s Becca Szkutak got the matching cursor, and Theresa Loconsolo got the smiling moon.
I guessed that at some point in all the Disrupt hoopla, Maggie and Becca had gone to some hip San Francisco tattoo shop to cement their friendship with tech-themed ink (or perhaps Theresa was there too?). That gave the look of a more logical explanation than the reality, which is that they got these tattoos at Disrupt – yes, literally at Disrupt, on the convention floor of the Moscone Center, while there was probably a conversation going on upstairs about product-market fit or agentic AI.
Hundreds of startups showed off their products on the Battlefield 200 show floor — there have been robot chefs, spaceship insurance providers, a shortcut to plastic recycling — and then amidst the chaos, Tattd turned their booth into a mini tattoo shop.
Tattd is a platform that helps tattoo seekers find artists whose portfolio matches the kind of tattoo they are looking for.
The startup uses generative artificial intelligence to create a mockup of the design, but these synthetic designs are not actually inked onto anyone’s body. Instead, Tattd subjects the AI-generated design to a reverse image search to seek out an artist whose work resembles the mockup, so that the client and artist can collaborate to create the original design, as would typically occur when contacting a tattoo artist.
“If you go to ChatGPT and say something like, ‘I want to see a traditional Japanese-style butterfly with heavier lines,’ they don’t know what that means,” founder Laura Schaak told TechCrunch.
A few feet away, TechCrunch deputy editor Karyne Levy was tattooing the escape key on her arm.
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Prior to founding Tattd, Schaak led two startups: WearAway, a clothing rental company acquired by Grin, and Lemonsqueeze, a market expansion platform acquired by Knotel. But Schaak all the time had an eye for art. She studied art history at New York University, and her body is decorated with a collage of tattoos – in Disrupt she got a California postage stamp at her elbow.
“A lot of people have tried to get into the tattoo industry without tattoos, and they’ve all failed,” Schaak said. While you’ll be able to’t judge a founder by her looks, she says her lack of tattoos reflects a lack of interest, investment or experience in the industry.
“I’m very passionate about this industry, I’m heavily tattooed, and I’m here to support artists in building their businesses in a way that takes care of both the customer and the artist,” she said. There are nine hundred artists on Tattd, and the platform works with third parties to assist them find health care and financial advisors.
Schaak said about 30 people got tattoos over the three days of TechCrunch Disrupt.
The flash sheet had the TechCrunch logo on it, but (un)fortunately, no one wrote their love for our brand on their bodies.