Chopper Tattoo Review

March 26, 2010

Chopper Tattoo is the most popular tattoo finder on the web, but it's not the best.

While it has many strengths, there are aspects of the service that are misleading. In the end, its breadth of tattoo designs shines.

Read on to learn how you can get the most from this service for the least amount of money. You'll also see the good and bad about this popular service to determine if it is the right tattoo finder for you.

Package Contents

Membership to the Chopper Tattoo web site
Free music downloads (bonus)
Inked magazine subscription (bonus)
Tattoo Parlor directory

Before you get too excited about these bonuses, I'd like to point out a few things:

Free music is provided via mp3suite.com. MP3Suite is a bit misleading in that it is a piece of software that you can use to access file sharing sites. That is, it provides organized access to music downloads that are already free. This is not explicitly stated anywhere on the site. Beware: just because you can freely download songs doesn't mean that it is legal to do so!
The Inked magazine subscription is for the online edition only. When you click the link in the members area, you're taken to one electronic issue. To access the other issues, click the "Archives" icon to view other issues that are available for viewing.
The tattoo parlor directory is nothing more than Yahoo's yellow pages .

Detailed Review

Chopper Tattoo is the oldest and most popular tattoo finder on the web, and it's not hard to see why when you begin looking through their designs. There are nearly 4,000 tattoo designs available for download, and hundreds of high-quality pictures that can be used for tattoo design inspiration.

A great feature about the Chopper service is that they actively encourage and reward tattoo artists for submitting quality designs. That means that their design collection will constantly be growing, and will constantly attract more artists and more talented artists.

You can browse tattoo designs by category, and download, use, and print out as many as you like during your membership period. Browsing is straightforward: each category consists of one long page with all of the tattoo designs for that category. This is both good and bad. If you have a fast internet connection, it works wonderfully, as you can just click the link and keep scrolling through all of the designs quickly. Talk about saving time. If, however, you have a slow connection, you could find yourself clicking on a link to a large category, only to wait for a few minutes while the page loads. Personally, I thought navigation was very fast using this method. TattooMeNow requires you to flip through individual pages, which made me click-weary after a while (see the full TattooMeNow review for details).

There are over 45 categories of tattoos, and most categories are well represented, having between fifty and one hundred designs in each category on average. Some categories, like tribal tattoo designs, dragons, and Chines tattoos have several hundred designs, while others (like lizards, fairies, and Harleys) have only 20 to 30 tattoo designs.

There are three membership options available as of this writing: 30 days access for $19.95, 60 days access for $24.95, and lifetime access for under $35. For most people, the sweet spot will be in the 60-day range. You'll have this tattoo for a lifetime, so take your time when making a decision! There is also a $4.95 tattoo lettering add-on option -- do not get this! On this blog (another post), I show you how you can access and use these same fonts to create your own tattoo lettering style for free. No sense paying $4.95 for it.

Pros:

Active tattoo artist incentives should continue to drive the growth of Chopper's available designs.
There are a lot of really good tattoo designs available for printing and download.
You can download, save, modify, etc. an unlimited number of tattoos.
The one-month membership has a very attractive $19.95 price point.
Each tattoo category is relatively well represented, offering a good number of choices in many different styles.
If you have a fast internet connection, scrolling through each design category is very fast.
Chopper is the most popular tattoo finder on the web.

Cons:

The search function is weak.
The tattoo parlor directory is weak.
The $4.95 tattoo lettering option is deceptive.
There are advertisements in the membership site. Some people don't mind these, but I find them tacky.
Chopper sometimes advertises a "$500 tattoo credit." This is not a bonus -- it's one of those deals where you have to sign up with 8 other services for at least two months in order to get the card. It's dubious at best (although I did get a free iPod a few years ago doing an offer similar to this ).

Based on all of the above factors and the relative scarcity of quality tattoo finders, I've given Chopper Tattoo an overall rating of four stars out of five. While there are some aspects of the service that I find tacky or misleading, I can't argue with the number and quality of designs that they have here. And it looks like that number will continue to grow, thanks to their tattoo artist program. With that said, even though the tattoo selection is great, the negatives of the service lead me to rank Chopper Tattoo as the runner-up among the tattoo finders.

Chopper Tattoo Official Web Site

Video Review

Customer Feedback

"You can download every single design, print it out and take it to your favourite tattoo studio. . . With a Chopper Tattoo Design you always have at least an idea to start from ([even] if you do not want to use the original design)."

~ comment from tattoosforgirls.net

"Most people. . . only pick a design when they are in a tattoo shop. Tattoo shops only have limited designs. . .Chopper Tattoo is by far the most popular tattoo resource in the world."

~ comment from a Squidoo lens

"Some fantastic art work! My son has found a very satisfactory tattoo which will be used to cover an existing one. Many thanks!"

~ Chopper Tattoo customer Jean Underwood

"Chopper Tattoo has all that they promised. . . mind blowing tattoos. Clients keep coming to my shop because of the quality designs I have for them."

~ Chopper Tattoo customer and freestyle artist Hon

Product Details

Author: N/A

Package: access to Chopper Tattoo's tattoo finder and design gallery, free online edition of Inked magazine, free download software from MP3suite.com. I didn't list the other bonuses as they are of dubious value.

Price: $19.95 for one month access, $24.95 for two months, $34.44 for lifetime access.

Return Policy: 60 days, no questions asked, money back guarantee.

Chopper Tattoo Official Web Site

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Create Tattoo Lettering With Free Fonts

January 19, 2009

During the Chopper Tattoo review, I mention that you should not choose the additional lettering option, and the reason is because those same fonts are freely available directly from FontFreak. This post will show you how to find and use fonts from FontFreak to create the perfect tattoo lettering for your new ink.

The process is straightforward, but some folks have a little trouble installing fonts, so the video will walk you through the process from start to finish. In a nutshell:

Head to FontFreak and choose a font for your tattoo lettering.
Download the font to your PC.
Install the font on your PC.
Open your graphics program of choice. If you don't have one, you can download gimp for free. It's quite capable and you can't beat the price.
Optionally print the image to a PDF file with a free utility like Primo PDF.

There are literally thousands of fonts that you can use for the perfect tattoo lettering style.