Request Similar Tattoo: turning inspiration into a booking in one click

Every tattoo artist knows this moment. Someone finds a piece in your portfolio, falls in love with it, and wants "something like that." Then they open a contact form and start typing a description from scratch, hoping they describe it well enough for you to know which piece they mean.

We're closing that gap with a new feature on Bookpay: Request Similar Tattoo.

What it does

Now, every image in an artist's portfolio has a "Request similar tattoo" button, right on the image and on its detail page. When a client clicks it, they land straight in the artist's custom request flow, the same one artists already build and control. But this time, the flow isn't empty.

The image itself comes along as a reference photo, attached automatically. If the artist has fields for description, placement, style, or color, those get pre-filled too, using information already tied to that portfolio piece. The client sees a request that already looks like the image they clicked on. They can edit anything, but they don't start from zero.

Why this is harder than it sounds

The tricky part isn't the button. It's that every artist's request form looks different. Artists rename questions, reorder them, add their own. One artist's "Where do you want it?" is another artist's "Placement, please." A system that tries to guess what a question means by reading its label will break the moment an artist rephrases anything.

So we built it differently. Every question, whether it's one of Bookpay's system questions or something an artist created themselves, gets tagged with what it's actually about: description, placement, style, color, or a reference image, among others. The artist still controls the wording and the order completely. What we're matching against is the tag underneath, not the words on the page.

That's also why, going forward, creating a new question means picking what it's about. It takes one extra click, and it's what makes the whole feature work without us ever having to parse anyone's phrasing.

What artists don't have to do

Nothing, if they don't want to. Every system question already carries its tag, so the feature works out of the box.

Artists who've built fully custom forms can tag their own questions the same way, or leave them untagged if they'd rather. An untagged question isn't broken. It just won't get filled in automatically, when the user clicks on request similar tattoo from the portfolio image.

The bigger idea

This is a small feature with a bigger point behind it: the gap between "I saw something I like" and "I've started the process of getting it" should be as short as possible. Every extra step in between is a chance for someone to lose momentum, get intimidated by a blank form, or just forget to follow up.

Request Similar Tattoo removes a step that never needed to exist. The inspiration and the request were always the same thing in the client's head. Now they're the same thing in the product too.

It's also a reason to keep your portfolio full. Every piece you upload is another chance for someone to click, request, and book. Increase your portfolio footprint to increase your booking opportunities.

Now live on BookPay.