● FREE● RUNS ON YOUR DEVICE● NO ACCOUNT
Photo in, stencil out: Sized in centimetres. Black where your printer needs black.
Stencil Bench turns a photo or a sketch into a tattoo stencil. It runs in your browser, on your own device. Your client's photo never leaves it.
Scroll, or go straight to the tool ↓
Most stencil trouble starts before the needle.
I read what artists and printer makers say goes wrong. Three things kept coming up, so the tool is built around them.
The printer
Grey and heavy black wreck a thermal print
One printer maker's own FAQ says artwork that is too dark causes jams, streaks and gaps. So the thermal setting here prints pure black and nothing else, and turns shading into dots.
Source: S8 stencil printer FAQ
The size
Print dialogs rescale, and paper sizes differ
A printer guide warns that an A4 and Letter mix-up prints the wrong size. The PDF here carries its real size in centimetres, and every sheet has a 50 mm line you can check with a ruler.
Source: Phomemo stencil printer guide
The big piece
A back piece does not fit on one sheet
Artists on the Tattooing 101 forum describe printing sections, then trimming and taping them together. Here a large stencil spreads across sheets with marks along every join, and you can move a join off a face.
Source: Tattooing 101 forum thread
Four steps. One page.
01 Image
Drop it in
A photo, a sketch or a scan. Crop it, fix the light, flip it.
02 Lines
Find the lines
One Detail slider. Thicken, thin, clear the specks. Lasso a busy background away.
03 Shading
Map the shading
Dotted tone boundaries, the way realism artists mark them. Or dots, halftone or hatching.
04 Print
Print it right
Pick your printer. Set the width in cm. Check the lines in mm. Save the PDF.
● The tool
Drop an image in. Nothing leaves your device.
Best on a laptop or a tablet. On a phone it works, but the canvas is small.
Stencil Bench_
Turn a photo or sketch into a tattoo stencil. Everything runs on this device, nothing is uploaded.
Drop an image here
Photo, sketch, scan or screenshot. You can also paste from the clipboard.
What it does not do.
Printers
It has not met your printer yet
The print check uses starting values for line width and gaps. Every printer and paper behaves a little differently. Print the test sheet first, and tell me where it is wrong.
Drawing
It does not draw for you
There is no AI in the stencil. It finds the lines that are already in your image, so it cannot invent one. The stock body photos are AI-generated, and they say so on the image.
Storage
It keeps nothing of yours
Your last job is saved in your own browser so you can reopen it. Nothing is sent anywhere. A photo of a client is never saved with the job.
Used it? Tell me what broke.
I am a marketer who builds. This is one of the things I built, and working artists make it better. The code is open source, under the MIT licence.
Tell me what broke
Which printer, which paper, what went wrong. A photo of the print helps. I read every one.
Email me →See how I work
I lead marketing and I build the systems underneath. This tool is a small sample of the second half.
Work with me →Read the code
One HTML file, no dependencies. Read it, run it offline, change it, send a fix.
On GitHub →