On Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, our Senior Producer Maggie Nye rolled up her jacket sleeve to indicate me her new tattoo: a basic, pixelated cursor arrow. TechCrunch’s Becca Szkutak acquired an identical cursor, whereas Theresa Loconsolo acquired a smiling moon.
I guessed that sooner or later throughout all of the Disrupt hoopla, Maggie and Becca wandered off to some stylish San Francisco tattoo store to cement their friendship with appropriately tech-themed ink (and possibly Theresa was there too?) That appeared like a extra logical rationalization than the truth, which is that they acquired these tattoos at Disrupt — sure, actually at Disrupt, on the Moscone Middle’s conference flooring, whereas upstairs, there was most likely a chat happening about product-market match or agentic AI.
A whole bunch of startups confirmed their stuff within the expo corridor as a part of the Battlefield 200 — there’s robo cooks, spacecraft insurance coverage suppliers, a shortcut for recycling plastic — after which amid the chaos, Tattd turned their sales space right into a mini tattoo store.
Tattd is a platform that helps tattoo seekers discover artists whose portfolios match the type of tattoo they’re on the lookout for.
The startup makes use of generative AI to create a mockup of a design, however these artificial designs aren’t truly getting inked on anybody’s physique. Relatively, Tattd places the AI-generated design by way of a reverse picture search to search out an artist whose work resembles the mockup, in order that the consumer and artist can work collectively to create an authentic design, as one usually would once they get related with a tattoo artist.
“If you go to ChatGPT and say something like, ‘I want to see a butterfly in a Japanese traditional style with heavier lines,’ they don’t know what that means,” founder Laura Schaak informed TechCrunch.
Simply toes away, TechCrunch Deputy Managing Editor Karyne Levy was getting an escape key tattooed on her higher arm.
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October 13-15, 2026
Earlier than founding Tattd, Schaak led operations for 2 startups: WearAway, a trend rental firm acquired by Grin, and Lemonsqueeze, a market growth platform acquired by Knotel. However Schaak has at all times had a watch for the humanities. She studied artwork historical past at New York College, and her physique is adorned with a collage of tattoos — at Disrupt, she acquired a California postage stamp by her elbow.
“There is a number of people that have tried to enter the tattoo industry without tattoos, and they have all failed,” Schaak mentioned. Whilst you can’t choose a founder by their look, she says that their lack of tattoos mirrored their lack of curiosity, funding, or expertise within the business.
“I’m so deeply passionate about this industry, I’m heavily tattooed, and I’m here to support artists to build businesses in a way that both the client and the artist are taken care of,” she mentioned. There are 9 hundred artists on Tattd, and the platform companions with a 3rd occasion to assist them discover healthcare and monetary advisors.
Schaak mentioned that round thirty individuals acquired tattoos all through the three days of TechCrunch Disrupt.
There was a TechCrunch brand on the flash sheet, however (un)happily, nobody inked their love for our model on their physique.
