Once entering the tattooing profession world, besides having specialized knowledge and skills, a tattoo artist must start investing in the necessary tools and equipment.
The standard tools will help you perform the job more smoothly and ensure the hygiene and safety of your customers.
Today, in this article, we will show you all you need in this tattoo tools and equipment list.
With no further ado, let’s dive right in!
Tattoo Tools And Equipment List For You To Get Started
1. Chair and Bed
First of all, you will need a special chair and bed for your customers. The tattoo chair and the tattoo bed are often padded, so the client will feel comfortable during the tattooing process, which helps relieve the pain.
⚠️ Cheap furniture can tire you out much faster and it can cause serious back, arm, and leg pain. Good furniture is comfortable, conforms to the body, and is easily adjustable.
Tattoo Beds For Clients: This is usually a sturdy bed with six legs and a good load capacity of about 500kg. They should have a headrest in the front that is higher than the foot section. Every part of the chair is adjustable; the backrest, legs, arms. The armrest can be raised or lowered. The product features a free rolling stool as well.
Chairs for Tattoo Artists is a specialized medical chair, divided into sections. It can adjust the upper part of the body, helping the worker to have a comfortable and easy working posture. The saddle is extra comfortable and reduces spine and back pressure. The chair has a full 360-degree rotation. The construction is durable and supports up to 300lbs.
2. Sanitary kit
The Medical kit includes cotton, bandages, and gauze, which are essential for tattooists.
This is because you have to do many things like wiping ink, applying anesthetics, and they all have to use sterile bandages.
Cotton bandages are usually packed 10 grams in plastic bags or paper packs.
Fat cotton is a soft layer of fiber after removing the cottonseed; it can be slightly yellow.
This lump is not placed directly on the wound but only wrapped to ease the pain when moving or bumping the injury. Besides, it is also used for insulation.
The cotton layer must be evenly white, dust-free, inorganic impurities. It must not be filled with bad cottons (waste cotton or rags) that are susceptible to weak bacteria. The typical humidity of this type is from 7 to 9%.
Another option is the absorbent cotton pad. This type of cotton can absorb water and any kind of liquid extremely well.
It is a perfect option for antiseptic or anesthetic solutions to apply to the skin’s surface.
And for gauze, you can also use medicinal gauze such as phenolic acid gauze, boric acid, ointment (not stick to the wound, so when changing the dressing is easy, the patient does not pain and the injury is against the young skin), and sulfamide gauze.
This type must be used according to the instructions of the physician. Swabs can be left in whole sheets or cut into small pieces of 20 x 20 cm when used freshly sterilized or pre-sterilized in sealed bags from production.
3. The tattoo machine
The two most popular types of tattooing machines are rotary tattoo machines and coil tattoo machines.
The coil tattoo machine is made in China. Tattoo artists consider it as a masterpiece, a perfect design without any missing.
To be more specific, the coil tattoo machine has an electric current flowing through its coils to create an electromagnetic field that quickly closes the circuit. The machine’s principle is to periodically pull the reinforcement bar (with the tattoo needle attached) into the skin.
On the other hand, at rotary tattoo machines, the rotor section controls the sticking bar for the tattoo needle. The rotor section moves alternately then turns into linear motion on the tattoo needle bar.
The most important thing to care about is the wire core and housing to choose a good tattoo machine.
The core creates a magnetic field that vibrates the reed to push the needle up and down. Usually, tattoo machines use three different types of coils: 8, 10, and wound 12. The 8-pack rings are used primarily when sketching less than five needles.
When using more than five needles should increase the voltage. But that will reduce the life of the device and even cause a fire.
The chassis is usually constructed of stainless steel material and is often decorated with carvings.
There are many different frames to choose from based on your preference. These are highly customizable, but they also require a lot of warranty.
So be careful with your warranty to ensure the change doesn’t take away any of its advantages.
Read more: Best Tattoo Machines Brands – Detailed Review
4. Tattoo ink
Don’t you know that most art tattoo inks aren’t inks?
These contain pigments distributed in a carrier solution. Otherwise, the pigment in tattoo ink is usually not a vegetable dye.
These pigments are mainly chemical ingredients, which consist of alkali metals and make up the color of the tattoo. However, some stains are plastics, and perhaps some tattoo inks contain plant dyes.
The carrier’s purpose is to keep the pigment evenly distributed in the liquid and inhibit pathogens’ growth. This will prevent the accumulation of pigmentation and help the pigmentation be evenly dispersed when it enters the skin.
The safest and most common carrier ingredients usually include Ethanol, Pure water, Witch hazel, Listerine, Propylene glycol, Glycerin.
Besides, there are also many harmful ingredients such as methanol, anticoagulants, and formaldehyde, a poisonous substance used to preserve.
The most important thing to remember is never to buy low-quality inks of unknown origin because they contain many harmful substances, causing infections and dangerous complications.
If you are not too abundant, there are plenty of affordable inks for beginners, but they often fade very quickly.
Read: 10 Best Tattoo Ink Brands (Reviews and Top Picks)
5. Needles and needles sterilizer
Tattoo needles are considered to be the most important part. It is used to walk the outline of a tattoo.
Today’s needles are integrated tattoo ink, which is “hidden” in the needle cluster’s slots. When piercing the skin at a frequency of 50 – 3,000 times/minute, the needles will pierce the epidermis, allowing the ink to penetrate deeper into the dermis, where collagen fibers, nerves, and blood vessels are concentrated.
Depending on the type of tattooing machine, the tattoo needle is selected. There are six popular types of tattoo needles, including RL needle, RS needle, needle F, needle M1, needle M2, and RM needle.
These can be tattoo needles arranged in clusters with three needles, up to 25 needles.
Each type of needle has a different role; some used to sketch, polish, or color.
Read more: 6 Best Tattoo Needles – A Complete And Concise Guide
Because these needles penetrate deeply into the skin, needle tip cleaning and disinfection are essential.
It is best to buy a sterilization boiler. The principle of autoclave operation is to use temperature in combination with pressure. The temperature is maintained at 121 degrees Celsius for about 5 to 15 minutes, causing the destruction of the bacteria on the tattoo needles.
This method’s special feature is that they remove even the spores of resistant bacteria, creating a sterile environment.
6. Chemical for skin sterilizer
Each time a needle is inserted into the skin, a wound will be created, alerting the body to activate the anti-inflammatory process, calling on immune cells to move to the injury and heal the skin.
This is the process of making tattoos permanent. However, when the system is unable to handle the damage, it can cause serious infections.
The antiseptic drug used is Betadine. Betadine is used to treat wounds or prevent infection before a needle is inserted into the skin.
This is an iodine combined complex with polyvinylpyrrolidone – povidone, including 9-12 percent of iodine, ease of soluble in alcohol as well as water.
Povidone is similar to an iodine carrier when using. For releasing iodine gradually, we will use a betadine solution, which helps to prolong the effect of removing viruses, bacteria, fungi, cocoons, protozoa, and spores.
Hence, in comparison with the drug’s effect, free iodine preparations are more efficient.
Read more: 7 Best Antibacterial Soap For Tattoos
7. Chemical for anesthetic
The tattooing process is often very painful, so the tattooist needs to use an anesthetic.
The anesthetic acts on all fibers of the central nervous system (sensory, motor) and phytoplankton, from small fibers to large fibers, depending on the drug’s concentration.
The loss of sensation is pain, cold, heat, shallow touch, then deep touch, and finally, movement. When the medication runs out, the effect reverses in the opposite direction.
However, the anesthetic should be used in exactly the dosage recommended by your doctor. The duration of anesthesia also needs to be calculated so that the tattoo is completed correctly.
This is because the amount of anesthetic that accumulates after a few times can have serious long-term health effects.
Moreover, if overdose, people will easily experience anaphylaxis seizures and lead to death.
8. Tattoo scanner and design computer
A scanner is a device to capture and transfer physical images from prints of text, documents, posters.
There are also journal pages and similar resources for display and editing on computers.
And the documents fed to the computer are flat panels, which can be scanned in color or black and white. And this tattoo scanner is often equipped with accompanying software.
Like Adobe’s Photoshop, you can change the size of an image.
The painting software helps tattooists a lot in the creating process. Machines can help people correct mistakes in drawings, and sometimes a whole new picture can be created.
It would be best to define the work you do graphic, whether it is live render (edit design on the computer screen) or finished render (output the final product for the client to see).
If your main job is live rendering, you need to choose machines with good video cards to edit and output the best quality images.
If it’s the finished render, the CPU and RAM are the parts you should invest in.
If you need great performance for a complicated 3D tattoo, you should bravely invest in the best equipment in the price range.
But for amateurs, it is best to choose moderately configured machines, bringing comfort to use.
Read more: 6 Best Tattoo Stencil Printer Reviews
9. Container for medical waste
You will spit at least one needle for each client for tattoos, and they are all bloody. Besides, cotton, bandages, gauze, scissors are also hazardous medical wastes that need to be properly collected.
They need to be sealed and sent to waste disposal centers for proper disposal.
Scissors, blood-stained needles are considered contagious wastes. This is regarded as one of the most dangerous types of waste.
Therefore, it needs to be handled optimally before being put into the decomposition environment. Otherwise, they can spread germs to humans easily and leave many consequences for society.
Equipment For Your Tattoo Studio
In addition to the tools to create tattoos, other assistive equipment is also very important.
1. Lighting system
Without a light, there’s nothing you can do, right.
Usually, with tattoo artists, you should use standing lamps with high-powered bulbs. You need to choose the type of lamp with the ability to adjust the direction and low height according to your liking.
The light emitted from the lamp should be white light to see the truest color of tattoo ink, making it easy for tattooists to adjust.
2. Electric system
Variable voltage is a device that supplies power to help the tattoo machine work. Besides, it is possible to adjust the speed of tattoo needles.
A voltage transformer is a device that isolates the primary from the secondary, the task of converting the grid voltage from high to low value, providing the device with the right power supply.
This device helps to protect the tattoo machine from being overloaded due to excessive current flowing through, preventing fire and explosion of the engine and power line.
In Conclusion
A tattoo artist needs to prepare a full range of accessories for each tattoo process to be able to create a pleasing and beautiful tattoo product for his customers.
The selection of quality tools helps you minimize any kind of complications that can occur in the process. Besides, a full set of tools also allows you to handle unexpected situations that may appear.
Thank you for reading this. Don’t forget to share this with beginners tattoo artists to know the tattoo shop accessories they need to prepare.
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