About Inkantic

Inkantic is a tattoo design app in development. This site is the part that does not need an app: 6 free tools for the elements of a tattoo made of letters rather than pictures, published ahead of the app because they are useful on their own.

How the tools work

Every tool here runs entirely in your browser. The word you type into the font generator is rendered by your own device, the PNG is drawn on a canvas in the page, and no request carries any of it anywhere. The same is true of the ambigram tool, the Morse code tool and the random brief generator.

That is a design decision, not a limitation. Client-side tools cost nothing to serve, which is why they are free and why we expect them to stay that way; the one caveat is availability rather than price, and it is stated in the terms of use. It also means there is no account, no email step and no gallery your name gets published to.

Fonts and licensing

Of the 24 lettering faces, 21 are published under the SIL Open Font License and three — Homemade Apple, Rock Salt and Special Elite — under Apache 2.0. Both licenses permit commercial use, which matters here: a stencil derived from a download can be tattooed, and the artist can charge for the work. The one thing the license forbids is selling the font files themselves, which nobody using this site is trying to do.

What we claim and what we test

Two rules. Anything stated about our own tools can be verified by using them. Anything stated about somebody else's tool is limited to what is checkable from the outside, and where a hands-on test is missing, the page says so rather than implying a test happened. Search figures name the month they were pulled, because a search volume without a date is not a fact.

The app

The Inkantic app is not in the stores yet, and there is no waiting list to join here. When it ships, the pages that mention it will say what it does and link to it. Until then the tools stand alone, which is how they were built.

Written by the Inkantic editorial desk. The full tool list is on the tools page, what happens to anything you type is set out in privacy, and what you may do with the exports is in the terms of use.