On Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, our Senior Producer Maggie Nye rolled up her jacket sleeve to point out me her new tattoo: a traditional, pixelated cursor arrow. TechCrunch’s Becca Szkutak obtained an identical cursor, whereas Theresa Loconsolo obtained a smiling moon.
I guessed that sooner or later throughout all of the Disrupt hoopla, Maggie and Becca wandered off to some fashionable San Francisco tattoo store to cement their friendship with appropriately tech-themed ink (and perhaps Theresa was there too?) That appeared like a extra logical rationalization than the fact, which is that they obtained these tattoos at Disrupt — sure, actually at Disrupt, on the Moscone Heart’s conference ground, whereas upstairs, there was in all probability a chat happening about product-market match or agentic AI.
Lots of 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. Somewhat, Tattd places the AI-generated design via a reverse picture search to seek out an artist whose work resembles the mockup, in order that the shopper and artist can work collectively to create an authentic design, as one usually would after they get related with a tattoo artist.
“If you happen to go to ChatGPT and say one thing like, ‘I wish to see a butterfly in a Japanese conventional type with heavier strains,’ they don’t know what which means,” founder Laura Schaak instructed 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 style rental firm acquired by Grin, and Lemonsqueeze, a market enlargement platform acquired by Knotel. However Schaak has all the time had an eye fixed 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 obtained a California postage stamp by her elbow.
“There’s quite a few those who have tried to enter the tattoo trade with out tattoos, and so they have all failed,” Schaak stated. Whilst you can’t decide a founder by their look, she says that their lack of tattoos mirrored their lack of curiosity, funding, or expertise within the trade.
“I’m so deeply obsessed with this trade, I’m closely tattooed, and I’m right here to assist artists to construct companies in a means that each the shopper and the artist are taken care of,” she stated. There are 9 hundred artists on Tattd, and the platform companions with a 3rd celebration to assist them discover healthcare and monetary advisors.
Schaak stated that round thirty individuals obtained tattoos all through the three days of TechCrunch Disrupt.
There was a TechCrunch brand on the flash sheet, however (un)thankfully, nobody inked their love for our model on their physique.
