There are two moments an artist goes looking for what ink went into a tattoo. The first is friendly: a touch-up or a continuation eighteen months later, and you want the exact brand and color so the new work matches the healed old work. The second is not: a client calls about a reaction, a dermatologist asks what's in the arm, and "probably my usual black, maybe the magenta?" is the whole record.
Both moments are solved by the same ninety seconds of logging per session. Almost nobody does it, because in the moment it feels skippable — you know what you used today. The log isn't for today.
What to write down
Per session, per client:
- Inks: brand and color name, as printed on the bottle. "Eternal — Lipstick Red," not "red." Batch numbers if you're thorough — that's the detail that matters most in the rare reaction case, and it's on the label you're already holding.
- Needles: groupings and configuration you actually ran. "3RL lines, 9MG shading."
- Machine, if you rotate between several and it affects your work.
- Anything the skin told you. "Took color slowly on the outer forearm" is gold when you're planning the next pass.
That's four lines. The discipline is attaching them to the client and the session, not to a general notebook where March 2025 is forty pages of mixed shops notes.
If your tool is a spreadsheet
Perfectly workable. One row per session:
Date | Client | Piece | Inks (brand — color; ...) | Needles | Notes
Two rules make it survive: fill the row the same day (next-day memory already drops the needle groupings), and keep one sheet per year, not per client — you'll search by ⌘F anyway, and per-client tabs die of neglect. The failure mode of spreadsheets isn't structure, it's friction: if the file lives on a laptop you don't open at the shop, the log dies in a month. Put it wherever your hands already are.
The reaction call, handled honestly
If a client reports a reaction, your log gives you the one thing you can genuinely contribute: exactly what went in and when. Hand the ink list to the client for their doctor, note the report date on their record, and resist the urge to play diagnostician — "here's the full list of what I used" is your lane, and it's a genuinely useful lane to be able to occupy on short notice.
(What you shouldn't build is a shadow medical file — allergy histories, conditions, medications. That's a different topic with real responsibilities attached, and we wrote about it separately: client allergy notes, done responsibly.)
Where this lives in a CRM
If you run your shop on software, the ink log belongs in the session record — the same place as the session's notes, price, and photos, because that's the record you'll actually open when the touch-up request arrives. In Stencil, each session on a client's project has a notes field where artists keep exactly this (inks, needles, how it took), sitting next to the fresh and healed photos from that sitting. When someone asks "what did we use?", the answer is one client page away, in order, with pictures.
Spreadsheet or CRM, the principle is the same: the log costs ninety seconds while the bottle is in your hand, and it's unpayable later. Start with the very next session — backfilling the past isn't realistic, and doesn't need to be.
Related: Tracking a multi-session sleeve · Client allergy records