Turn a photo or a design into clean stencil line art, ready to print or trace. Your image never leaves your device — everything runs in your browser.
Line art and bold designs convert almost perfectly. Photographs work best when the subject is well lit and separated from the background — a portrait against a busy room will pick up the room.
This is the control that matters. Drag it down to keep fine detail such as hair and texture, or up until only the strongest outlines remain. Most photos land somewhere in the middle.
Camera noise and skin texture become tiny dots in the stencil. Smoothing removes them before the edges are found. Raise it one step at a time — too much softens the outlines you want to keep.
Print at the exact size the tattoo will be, not scaled to fit the page. Thermal paper gives a transferable stencil; plain paper is fine for tracing or for showing an artist what you are after.
A stencil carries outlines, not tone. If a design depends on colour or subtle shading to read, it will look empty as line art. Crop tightly to the subject and remove busy backgrounds first — the tool cannot tell which edges you care about.
Faces rely on gradual shading that edge detection has nothing to grab. Expect to raise smoothing and lower sensitivity, and treat the result as a guide for placement and proportion rather than a finished stencil. Most artists redraw a portrait by hand regardless.
Most tattooists prefer to make their own stencil, and many will adjust yours to fit the flow of the body part. A stencil from this tool is a strong starting point for that conversation, not a replacement for it.
Yes, and there is no signup. The tool runs entirely in your browser, so there is no cost to us per use and nothing to gate. You only need an account if you want to generate a new design rather than convert one you already have.
No. The image is read into a canvas in your own browser tab and processed there. It is never sent to a server, never stored, and disappears when you close the page.
High contrast and a clean background. Existing line art, flash designs and bold graphics convert almost perfectly. Photographs need more adjustment, and busy backgrounds will produce lines you do not want — crop them out first.
Tattooists print onto thermal transfer paper and apply it with a stencil solution. That is a job for a professional in a sterile setting. This tool produces the artwork; it is not a guide to tattooing yourself.
Yes. Large images are scaled down before processing so it stays quick on a phone, which also keeps the stencil at a sensible resolution for printing.