On Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, our Senior Producer Maggie Nye rolled up her jacket sleeve to show me her new tattoo: a classic, pixelated cursor arrow. TechCrunch’s Becca Szkutak got a matching cursor, while Theresa Loconsolo got a smiling moon.
I guessed that at some point during all the Disrupt hoopla, Maggie and Becca wandered off to some trendy San Francisco tattoo shop to cement their friendship with appropriately tech-themed ink (and maybe Theresa was there too?). That seemed like a more logical explanation than the reality, which is that they got these tattoos at Disrupt — yes, literally at Disrupt, on the Moscone Center’s convention floor, while upstairs, there was probably a talk going on about product-market fit or agentic AI.
Hundreds of startups showed their stuff in the expo hall as part of the Battlefield 200 — there’s robo chefs, spacecraft insurance providers, a shortcut for recycling plastic — and then amid the chaos, Tattd turned their booth into a mini tattoo shop.
Tattd is a platform that helps tattoo seekers find artists whose portfolios match the kind of tattoo they’re looking for.
The startup uses generative AI to create a mockup of a design, but these synthetic designs aren’t actually getting inked on anyone’s body. Rather, Tattd puts the AI-generated design through a reverse image search to find an artist whose work resembles the mockup, so that the client and artist can work together to create an original design, as one normally would when they get connected with a tattoo artist.
“If you go to ChatGPT and say something like, ‘I want to see a butterfly in a Japanese traditional style with heavier lines,’ they don’t know what that means,” founder Laura Schaak told TechCrunch.
Just feet away, TechCrunch Deputy Managing Editor Karyne Levy was getting an escape key tattooed on her upper arm.
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Before founding Tattd, Schaak led operations for two startups: WearAway, a fashion rental company acquired by Grin, and Lemonsqueeze, a market expansion platform acquired by Knotel. But Schaak has always had an eye for the arts. She studied art history at New York University, and her body is decorated with a collage of tattoos — at Disrupt, she got a California postage stamp by her elbow.
“There is a number of people that have tried to enter the tattoo industry without tattoos, and they have all failed,” Schaak said. While you can’t judge a founder by their appearance, she says that their lack of tattoos reflected their lack of interest, investment, or experience in the industry.
“I’m so deeply passionate about this industry, I’m heavily tattooed, and I’m here to support artists to build businesses in a way that both the client and the artist are taken care of,” she said. There are nine hundred artists on Tattd, and the platform partners with a third party to help them find healthcare and financial advisors.
Schaak said that around 30 people got tattoos throughout the three days of TechCrunch Disrupt.
There was a TechCrunch logo on the flash sheet, but (un)fortunately, no one inked their love for our brand on their body.
