The story behind Beeinked

How this started

I'm Matt. I married a tattoo artist called Bee. (Yes, that's where the name comes from.)

For years I sat on the sofa watching her wrestle with Squarespace. Watching her friends — incredible artists, the kind whose work makes you stop scrolling — pay £15 a month for a website builder that they didn't have time to actually use. Watching slick agency adverts pop up on her Instagram feed selling "premium tattoo artist websites" for four-figure setup fees and a glossy onboarding deck.

The whole thing wound me up. I know what's involved in building a website. I know what's actually hard about it (none of it is the bit Squarespace charges you for) and I know what corporate marketing aimed at tattoo artists looks like — vague promises, fake urgency, and a lot of stock photos of people in meetings.

Why I'm qualified to do this

The very short version: I've spent two decades in the unglamorous bit of the internet. The bit that doesn't have a logo on it. The bit that breaks at 3am.

• I started in networking for ISPs and large data centres — the actual cables and routers that move the internet around.
• Then infrastructure for websites doing 20+ million hits a week. The kind of traffic where a single bad deploy is a very expensive afternoon.
• These days I'm a software architect for an international shipping firm. Giant systems, lots of moving parts, very little tolerance for nonsense.

I'm not telling you that to brag. I'm telling you that because when I say "your Squarespace site is slow because of how it's built and there's nothing you can do about it" — I actually know why. And when I say "the SEO is the easy bit if you set it up right from day one" — I've set it up right on systems where being wrong cost a lot more than a missed booking.

Why I actually care

I'm not in the tattoo industry. Bee is. Her friends are. They're some of the most talented, hard-working, generous people I've come across. And the digital side of their craft is, almost universally, a mess that's costing them money.

I wanted to do something useful with the bit of skill I've got. The personal reason is this: I think a rising tide raises all ships. If a few more genuinely good tattoo artists end up on page one of Google instead of the studio whose only edge is a £400 Wix theme, that feels like a fair use of my time.

That's the whole pitch. No origin-story polish, no "we're disrupting the tattoo industry" deck. I just want artists I respect to have less rubbish to deal with.

Where we are

Beeinked is run from rural Wales. The office is a desk. The dress code is "have you got coffee yet." We work with tattoo artists across the UK and Ireland, and we're picky on purpose — there's only one of me, and a website you can't update isn't a website I want to ship.

If any of this resonates, the next step is small: send us your photos. We'll have a look, drop you a reply, and go from there.