How much a tattoo costs in Prague

Asking about price is not rude. What is rude is answering "it depends" and letting someone leave knowing exactly as much as when they arrived. So, concretely.

What it costs with me

I work in three ranges. These are starting figures: they say what I will not go below, not what you will end up paying.

• Small work, from 2,500 CZK. Up to 5x5 cm, a simple motif or symbol, roughly an hour under the machine.
• Medium work, from 5,000 CZK. 10 to 15 cm, detailed rendering, around three hours. Most people choose this.
• Large work, from 7,500 CZK. From 15 cm upwards, five hours or more, full rendering and texture.

I give the exact figure after a consultation, once I can see the motif, the placement and what you actually want from the piece. The consultation is free and commits you to nothing.

What the price covers

The session is the last part of the job, not the whole of it. Before it, hours go into drawing the design, finding a composition that will sit on one particular arm, and redrawing when the first version does not work.

Then there are the consumables, opened once and thrown away, the sterilisation equipment, and pigments certified in the EU. You can economise there. It shows on the skin about three years later, not immediately.

The rest is experience. You pay for it not because I am good but because it is what makes the work survive: a line set at the right depth stays a line in ten years, a shallow one fades out, a deep one spreads.

Why I do not charge by the hour

An hourly rate is convenient for the artist and bad for the client. A slow day lands on your bill and rushing gets rewarded. I do not want a clock in my head while I decide whether a shadow is finished.

So we agree the price for the whole piece in advance. If it takes me two hours longer than I estimated, that is a mistake in my estimate, not a surcharge on you.

What raises the price and what does not

The common assumption is that you pay per centimetre. You pay per hour, and density of detail is what decides the hours.

• Raises it: fine linework across the whole area, realistic shading, portraits, stone or feather texture, covering an old piece.
• Raises it less than you expect: size on its own. A large but airy motif can come in below a small, densely packed one.
• Raises it because of the body: ribs, feet, inner arm, elbow. The skin is thinner and moves more, so the work goes slower.
• Does not raise it: asking a lot of questions. The consultation is not a line on the invoice.

The deposit and how payment works

I hold a date only after a deposit. It is not an extra charge: it comes off the final price, so the total does not change. It covers the hours I spend drawing before we even meet.

The practical reason is simpler. A booked day that nobody turns up for is a day I turned someone else away. The deposit splits that risk between the two of us instead of leaving all of it with me.

You pay the rest after the session. I name the exact deposit when we agree the date, once the scope is clear.

Why a cheap tattoo costs more

This is the one place in the article where I am going to be unpleasant. You usually cannot see the difference between cheap and expensive work in the first month. You see it in three years.

A shallow line fades and breaks into dots. Too deep and it spreads into a blue smudge. A composition built without regard for the muscle underneath falls apart in movement. None of that is fixable with cream.

Two things fix it, and both cost more than the original. A cover-up means a bigger, darker motif than you wanted, because it has to hide what is underneath. Laser removal is five to ten sessions, each one worse than the tattoo itself, with six weeks of waiting between them.

When you work out the price, work it out over ten years. On that horizon, two thousand crowns between two artists is statistically uninteresting.

Where you can sensibly spend less

You can save money, just not on whoever is holding the machine. These work:

• Shrink the size, not the detail. A motif a third smaller often reads just as well and saves an hour.
• Drop the background. Ornament or shaded area around the main motif is often half the time.
• Split it into stages. A sleeve can be done in parts months apart, each paid for separately.
• Take a ready design. The available motifs are already drawn, so the drawing time disappears.

What does not work is ringing ten studios and picking the lowest number. Price is the last criterion worth applying, and only among artists whose work you would actually want to wear.

How to find out your price

Send me the motif, a rough size and the placement. You do not need a finished idea, a direction is enough, even "something with an angel, forearm, on the smaller side". You will get a concrete range back, not the word "individual".