Calculator
Tattoo deposit and no-show calculator
Put in your inquiry volume, booking rate and deposit amount to see what empty chair time costs and how much of it your deposit policy brings back.
Free tools
Free calculators for tattoo artists and studio owners
Two working calculators built on the numbers that decide whether custom tattoo bookings pay: money lost to empty chair time, and hours lost to messages and drawing.
Most tattoo pricing arguments come down to two figures nobody has written down: what an empty chair hour actually costs once drawing time is counted, and how many hours a week disappear into replying to inquiries that never book. These two calculators put a number on both.
Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere. Change the inputs to match your own week, your own session prices and your own deposit rule, and the results move as you type. Run them before your next rate change, or before you rewrite the deposit terms on your booking page.
Calculator
Unpaid tattoo studio hours planner
Add up your reply time, drawing time and studio admin to see how much of the working week you are genuinely paid to be tattooing.
Working document
The custom tattoo intake sheet template
A one page sheet you fill in for every custom inquiry, so nothing about size, placement, budget or terms is still vague when you start drawing.
Why the chair hour math is open to everyone
Tattoo artists already run these sums by hand, usually in a phone note between sessions or on the back of a consent form while the wrap is going on. Booth rent and insurance divided by the hours the machine was actually running, needles and pigment and card fees taken off a session price, a forfeited deposit set against a half sleeve slot nobody could refill on a Saturday. Then the other pile that never gets counted at all: nine minutes on a message thread that goes nowhere, two and a half hours drawing a forearm piece, an evening redoing a stencil after the client changed the placement. Asking someone to open an account before they can multiply their own numbers would be a strange way to treat an artist who is doing this at eleven at night.
So both calculators run in the browser, with no sign up and nothing kept. Take the empty chair figure into a booth rent conversation or use it the next time you set an hourly rate, and take the unpaid hours behind each custom piece into your next quote so a four hour drawing job stops being priced as if it were pure needle time. Those two numbers stand on their own even if you never open StencilIntake, because between them they answer most of what a custom tattoo booking argument is really about.
From the calculator to the next commission
Lost chair value and unpaid drawing hours both come back to the same thing: too many half scoped inquiries reaching your calendar and too much of your week spent asking for the same six answers by hand. Book a demo and bring the figures you just ran. We will set up your rates, deposit amount and reschedule terms on the call and put a live intake link in front of you.