Tattoo stencil guides

A tattoo stencil is the line drawing an artist transfers onto skin before tattooing, and everything about it affects the finished piece: how the reference was converted, how thick the lines are, whether it was mirrored, how it was sized for the body part, and how cleanly it went onto the skin. These guides cover that whole chain. They start with turning a photo or a client's reference into a tattooable line drawing, then move through thermal, hectograph and freehand transfer, stencil printers and copiers, line weight, sizing for placement, and the mistakes that make a stencil smudge or disappear halfway through a session. Every guide is written from testing real stencil output on transfer paper, not from theory. Where Stencil AI helps, such as converting a photo into pure black outlines or mirroring before transfer, it is mentioned with its limitations; where a pencil and tracing paper do the job better, that is said too.