Your portfolio is being stolen by AI.
You’ve probably already got opinions about AI tattoo art. The stuff generated from prompts like “traditional rose tattoo flash” that ends up on Pinterest, on print-on-demand merch sites, on people’s phones when they come in wanting “something like this.” Work that looks vaguely familiar because it was trained on work that is familiar — because it was trained on yours.
Here’s the part most artists don’t know: your website is one of the places they got it from.
How scraping actually works
Image scraping bots are automated scripts that crawl the web, download images, and feed them into training datasets. They don’t ask. They don’t credit. They just show up, grab everything, and leave.
They’re drawn to portfolios because portfolios are exactly what they need: high-quality images, clearly categorised, already labelled with helpful alt text like “blackwork geometric sleeve” or “fine line botanical forearm.” You’ve done the curation work for them.
The big AI art platforms have done enormous scrape operations over the years — billions of images pulled from across the web. Smaller, newer models are still doing it continuously. And beyond AI training, there are content thieves, style copycats, and SEO scrapers harvesting your images to use elsewhere.
Your Instagram is harder to scrape at scale (Meta actively fights it). Your website — if it’s a basic Wix or Squarespace build with no protections in place — is wide open.
What we block, and how
Every site we build includes a layered approach to keeping bots out. Not one setting buried in a dashboard — actual defence in depth.
Cloudflare bot protection is the first line. All Beeinked sites sit behind Cloudflare, which maintains a constantly-updated list of known bad actors: AI training crawlers, content scrapers, and data harvesters. Many of them are blocked before they even reach your site. Cloudflare identifies bots by behaviour, fingerprint, and reputation — not just by whether they announce themselves.
robots.txt tells crawlers what they’re not allowed to index. Well-behaved bots respect it. The major AI training operations — including most of the large model providers — now have their own crawler agents listed, which means we can block them specifically by name. We ship a robots.txt that disallows all the known AI training crawlers by default.
Yes, badly-behaved scrapers ignore robots.txt. That’s what the Cloudflare layer is for.
Rate limiting stops bots that try to hammer through the pages quickly. A real person browsing your portfolio moves at a certain pace. A bot pulling every image in sequence moves very differently. We throttle requests that don’t look human.
No hotlinking means your images can’t be embedded directly on other sites. If someone tries to link directly to your photo files to display them elsewhere, they get nothing.
”Isn’t this stuff already handled?”
Not by default on DIY platforms, no.
Wix and Squarespace give you a website. They don’t configure bot rules for you, they don’t add AI-specific crawler blocks, and their CDN protections are basic. You’d have to go digging through settings — assuming the options even exist — and know what you’re looking for.
We set it up properly from day one because it should be on by default for every artist, not something you get around to when you figure out the problem exists.
Does this make you completely scrape-proof?
Honest answer: no. Someone determined enough can always get around protections. What we’re doing is making your site a harder target than the thousands of unprotected portfolios out there. Scrapers are running automated operations - they move on when they hit resistance.
Think of it like locking your car. It doesn’t stop a professional car thief. It stops the opportunist who’s trying the door handles on every car on the street.
Most of these scraping operations are exactly that: opportunistic and automated. Make it annoying enough and they skip you.
Why this matters more for tattoo artists
Other industries have this problem too, but tattoo artists are a specific target for a specific reason: tattooing is an intensely style-driven craft where an artist’s personal aesthetic is their entire business identity. A photographer can watermark images. A painter can release low-res previews. A tattoo artist’s portfolio has to show fine, high-quality detail — the linework, the shading, the healed results — because that’s what clients need to see to book.
That clarity is exactly what AI training needs too.
The community has already fought hard against AI-generated tattoo art on moral and professional grounds. This is the practical side of the same fight: actually blocking the pipelines that feed those models where we’re able to.
It’s included. No extra tier, no add-on.
Scraper protection isn’t a premium feature on Beeinked sites. Every plan gets Cloudflare protection, the AI-blocking robots.txt, rate limiting, and hotlink prevention set up from day one.
Because it shouldn’t be something artists have to ask for.
If you want to see what else we do by default — or you’re currently on a Wix site wondering whether your portfolio has been wide open for the last two years — pricing is here. Or just send a message on WhatsApp and we’ll have a look at what you’ve got.