About Tattoo Standard

Who publishes this

Tattoo Standard is published by Penguin Tattoo Co, an Australian brand that manufactures tattoo aftercare products.

That is a real conflict of interest and we are not going to bury it in a footer. A site that writes about tattoo aftercare while being owned by a company that sells tattoo aftercare has an obvious incentive to tell you things that are good for its business rather than good for you.

We think the answer to that is not to pretend the conflict does not exist. It is to be upfront about it, and then to run the site in a way that you can actually check.

The rules we hold ourselves to

We do not publish product comparisons or best-of lists. A company that makes a balm has no business publishing a "best tattoo balm" article. Any site that does this while owning one of the products in the list is misleading you, and we are not going to be one of them.

Our ingredient database is factual, not editorial. Every ingredient entry describes what a substance is and what the evidence says it does, with a reference. We do not rate ingredients as good or bad, and we do not stack the deck toward what happens to be in our own formulations.

Our guides take positions. This is not a contradiction of the above. A guide that refuses to tell you anything useful in the name of neutrality is worthless. So we will tell you that Vaseline is the wrong product for week one, that balms are mis-sold as healing products when they are maintenance products, and that most of what you have been told about why to avoid petroleum jelly is nonsense. We will just do it without pointing you at our own shop.

Every article carries a disclosure. Bottom of the page, every time, so you never read anything here without knowing who wrote it and why.

What we are trying to build

Australian tattoo information online is mostly bad. It is either studio blogs written to fill a content calendar, aftercare brands writing thinly disguised advertisements, or American content that does not reflect Australian products, climate, regulation or practice.

We are building the thing we wanted and could not find: a straight, checkable, Australian reference for people getting tattooed and people looking after them. Aftercare guides that tell you what is actually happening in your skin. An ingredient index you can look things up in. Tools that answer a specific question rather than collecting your email address.

It is a work in progress and it will be for a long time.

Where the information comes from

Where a claim is contested, or clinical, or comes from research, we say where it came from and we link it. Where something is our opinion, we say that too. Where we do not know, we say we do not know, rather than filling the gap with something that sounds authoritative.

Nothing on this site is medical advice. We write about tattoo healing, which is a normal biological process, but if something on your skin is going wrong, a doctor is a better source than a website. That includes this one.

Tell us when we are wrong

We will get things wrong. When we do, we would rather hear about it and fix it than leave it up. If you are an artist, a dermatologist, a chemist, or just someone who has spotted a mistake,get in touch.

Corrections get made to the article, not quietly buried.

The commercial bit, plainly

Penguin Tattoo Co makes money selling aftercare products. Tattoo Standard exists partly because we think the information should exist, and partly because a company that publishes genuinely useful information tends to end up trusted, and trusted companies sell things.

That is the deal, stated plainly. You get the information for free with no product pitch in it. We get the reputation. If you eventually buy something from us because you decided we were worth trusting, that is the whole business model, and it only works if the information is actually good.

So we have a strong commercial incentive not to lie to you. Read the site with that in mind, and hold us to it.