The Church Tattoo

The brief

A busy Victorian schoolhouse studio with 10 resident artists, founded in 2016, with a waiting list built off Instagram and nowhere serious to send people. They needed a proper home for the brand and the artists, a clear booking flow, and a credible base on Google. The goal was a site that looked as considered as the work itself and made it easy to enquire about the right artist, not just the studio in general.

What we did

• 17 fast, prerendered pages: home, artists index, 10 artist detail pages, studio gallery, aftercare, testimonials, contact, and a holding shop page
• Brand-led artist roster styled as a Mortal Kombat arcade screen, with insert-coin start, in-cabinet music, and a sound on selection (client brief: the owner is a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan)
• Each artist's booking button opens a pre-filled email straight to that artist by name, so enquiries never land in a shared inbox
• Contact form wired to Web3Forms with a mailto fallback and a honeypot for spam
• Studio gallery, aftercare accordion, and a testimonials section using real Google reviews
• Full SEO and generative engine setup: structured data for the business, all 10 artists and reviews, sitemap, robots, llms.txt. Lighthouse 96 SEO, 100 accessibility, 100 best practices
• Branded email signature for the studio, hosted on the site with a private install guide at /signature for staff
• Handover document at /handover with content instructions and brand reference for the team

The numbers

Gallery

What we said no to

• Tattoo studio cliches. Gothic typefaces, dripping ink textures, and biker fonts were off the table. The studio is a Victorian schoolhouse with serious artists and the site reads as that.
• A booking widget or CRM. The Church works on relationships, so enquiries go straight to the artist by email, addressed to them by name. No middleware between client and artist.
• WordPress. The studio's content changes a few times a year, not daily. A heavy CMS would have been overhead, not infrastructure.

Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router, Turbopack)
• React 19
• TypeScript 5
• Tailwind v4
• GSAP and ScrollTrigger
• Lenis smooth scroll
• SplitType
• Web3Forms
• Vercel