5 Best Drawing Tablets for Tattoo Artists in 2024

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Want to take your tattoo designs to the next level? Whether you're an experienced tattoo artist or just starting out, having the right tools can make all the difference.

In this article, we’ll explore the best drawing tablets to meet the unique needs of tattoo artists. From iPad to Samsung to XPPen, we'll dig into key features like pressure sensitivity, screen size, and more to help you find the perfect tablet to bring your tattoo vision to life.

What drawing tablet do most tattoo artists use?

For tattoo artists, there are three primary types of drawing tablets: graphics tablets, drawing tablets and standalone drawing tablets.

The choice of drawing tablet among tattoo artists can vary based on individual preferences and needs. However, many tattoo artists prefer using drawing tablets with screen or standalone drawing tablets due to their direct visualization capabilities and portability.

Popular drawing tablet brands among tattoo artists such as XPPen. The company offer drawing tablets with high-resolution screens, pressure sensitivity, and ergonomic designs, which are essential for creating detailed tattoo designs.

Standalone drawing tablets, such as the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil or the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 with the S Pen, are also favored by some tattoo artists for their portability and versatility. These devices offer powerful drawing capabilities and a wide range of drawing and design applications that cater to the needs of tattoo artists.

5 Best drawing tablets for Tattoo Artists: Reviews & Recommendations

Next, we will introduce 5 best drawing tablets for all tattoo artists, including standalone tablets and drawing tablets for PC.

1. iPad Pro 12.9-inch

iPad Pro with apple pencil is a great tool for tattoo work and can make creation of any tattoo design a lot easier and less time consuming.

The 12.9 inch large screen will feel as big as a laptop, plus apple pencil will blow your mind with on intuitive and reactive it is. Procreate drawing app is great for doodling, sketching, and doing linework .

As far as screen quality goes ipad pro is great, it's a glass screen, offering a resolution of 2048x2732 pixels at a pixel density of 264 pixels per inch (ppi). plus the super retina hd display tech of apple is supposed to be really good.

The display can refresh at up to 120Hz and supports dynamic refresh rate switching. It also has lower reflections, DCI-P3 color space, True Tone, and HDR video.

Apple Pencil is considered one of the most advanced styluses in the market and known for its consistent, smooth, and reliable performance.

Drawing has a better feel thanks to the speedier processor. The higher refresh rate also ensures that latency when using the Apple Pencil is reduced further to 20 ms.

As for the cameras themselves, the rear-mounted 12MP wide and 10-MP ultra-wide sensors take great photos.

2. Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra

Incredibly slim, sleek design, a brilliant, punchy screen that's expansive – perfect for watching, photo editing, or sketching on, and plenty of power help Samsung's Galaxy tab S8 Ultra stand out.

With Samsung's AMOLED screen technology, which is incredibly deep, vibrant, and rich, which is one of the finest and most color-accurate displays out there with support for HDR10+.

The 14.6-inch display supports a resolution of 2960 x1848, plus the high 120 Hz refresh rate makes every touch and pen input interaction feel very smooth.

The display looks beautiful. Bezels are thin. Colours are vibrant and display is bright. All visuals look sharp.

The included S Pen is well built, has a matte textured surface, nice to hold, has one side button and a firm rubberised tip.

The S Pen is almost cylindrical, and it feels more natural on first use given the softer, more pen-like tip. supports up to 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity with tilt recognition – and it works great.

This is the best Android tablet for creating digital art and tattoo design.

3. Surface Pro 8

The Surface Pro 8 is an excellent tablet that comes with Windows 11. Digital creatives will love the power on offer here in a tablet form factor, but you'll need to spend extra for a stylus.

It comes with a 13-inch PixelSense display with a resolution of 2,880 x 1,920, and at this screen size, that leads to a fantastic looking display with pin-sharp details.

On some models you can now up the refresh rate from 60Hz to 120Hz. it makes using a stylus for doodling even more responsive.

The most advanced versions featured an Intel Core i7-1185G7 processor with integrated Iris graphics, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. You can opt for an i5 model with half the RAM and storage, but performance will take a hit.

The image is very sharp, because there with a good 10MP rear-facing webcam and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, which can capture video/image in 1080p.

Surface Pro 8 battery lasts only 6~8 hours on average use but advertised to last 16hr! Good tablet, good pen, not so good battery life.

If you want a capable tablet but don't want to switch to iOS or Android, the Surface Pro 8 is a great choice.

Unlike iPads or Android tablets which run mobile operating systems, the Surface Pro 8 isn't limited to mobile apps. So, you can run full Windows apps such as Adobe Photoshop, while still benefitting from the slim and light tablet form.

4. XPPen Magic Drawing Pad

The Magic Drawing Pad is a perfect drawing tablet for tattoo artists because it has built-in Android system and can be used without connecting to a computer. You can use it everywhere and anytime.

Unlike most tablets, the Magic Drawing Tablet is equipped with the X3 Pro Pencil, which has 16,384 levels of pressure sensitivity. In addition, with advanced EMR (Electro-magnetic Resonance) technology, X3 Pro Pencil delivers a digital drawing experience that feels as intuitive and natural as pen on paper.

Plus, You can enjoy 3-month free membership upon activating the ibis Paint X account along with the purchase of the Magic Drawing Pad.

5. XPPen Artist 22 Plus

Artist 22 Plus has been lauded for its high-pressure sensitivity, featuring 16,384 levels and a 60° tilt function that enhances drawing precision and mimics the nuance of traditional art tools.

The display has a 22-inch full screen with 1920x1080 resolution, providing a wide viewing angle and decent contrast. The X3 Pro Smart Chip Stylus is designed for comfort and precision, with a lightweight body and an initial activation force of just 3 grams.

Plus, It's compatible with Windows 7 (or later), macOS 10.10 (or later), Chrome OS 88 (or later), Android (USB3.1 DP1.2), Linux. You can use it on most PCs.

Bonus: 7 Best Design Software & Apps for Tattoo Artist

Whether you're a tattoo artist or someone looking to get a tattoo, there are plenty of design apps to aid your decision.

While using an app from the Apple App Store or Google Play is the most common, many revert to using software like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. That being said, you should use the option that best fits your budget and skills in technology.

Procreate

Procreate is great for "painterly" work and pencil sketching because of the minimalist interface, Available only on iPad, and packed with features artists and creative professionals love.

One of the biggest advantages of this app is that the default brush sets are beautiful and they are fully customisable.

Moreover, you can create your own brush/brush set to meet your own drawing needs.

Moreover, the powerful “Adjustment” function located at the top left corner in Procreate (icon looks like a magic wand),

allows you to apply various effect to the selected layer, including Blurs, Sharpen, Noise, Hue, Saturation, Brightness, etc.

In almost no time at all, Procreate has become the essential tool for digital illustration on the iPad due to its intuitive interface and the variety of resources and artistic styles for which it can be used.

Designing digitally makes it easy to create perfect lines for stencils, present work to clients, and quickly resize designs during an appointment.

Adobe Fresco

Adobe Fresco replaced the two previous mobile drawing apps from Adobe, Photoshop Sketch, and Illustrator Draw. both were discontinued for iOS and Android and are no longer available for download.

Adobe Fresco is a powerful new iPad app that combines your favorite Photoshop brushes with vector brushes and Live brushes.

This new functionality allows you to “paint with watercolors and oils that blossom, blend, smear, and smudge just like the real thing.” Since vector brushes are also an option, you can create crisp, clean lines that are infinitely scalable so you can print your masterpieces at an size.

Adobe Fresco has the power of the Photoshop painting engine. It's USP, the "real-time brushes" that duplicate the communication of ink or paint with paper. Its element of the specialist system jobt hat Adobe brands like Sensei.

Adobe Fresco is free for the basic version, but like all things Adobe, there's a monthly fee for more advanced features and Photoshop Creative Cloud integration. If you have an iPad and an Apple Pencil, it's worth downloading the trial just to check it out.

Some tattoo flash I did on Adobe Fresco. It's got a super neat watercolor live brush. Works like a charm!

Clip Studio Paint

Clip Studio Paint Pro is the perfect program for artists on a budget since it doesn't cost very much but still provides plenty of vector and brush tools for you to create professional-looking comics.

For more detailed work for both lineart and painting, I prefer CSP due to it's more advanced features. I don't use CSP for manga/comics or animation, but I use it kind of like a better Photoshop geared towards illustration and general digital art.

It is definitely more complex and takes a lot of time to learn, but it has a lot of features that Procreate just doesn't even try to have.

For example, the vector options alone would probably be worth the price for you. You can draw a line and then pull/adjust it into place. The inking brushes are extremely smooth and crisp. Anything that involves inkwork is going to be better on CSP than Procreate.

The most impressive feature of this is how easy it is to draw. The brushes "feel" natural and drawing is smooth. Changing sizes and shapes are intuitive and line weights react excellent from graphic tablets.

Available on Windows, macOS, iPad, iPhone, Android & Chromebook. You don't need a new device to make pro art!

Adobe Photoshop CC

Photoshop is one of the most popular and powerful photo editing software programs used by tattoo artists. It allows them to create custom designs and make changes to existing designs.

In addition to providing a complete photo editing experience, Photoshop is a great drawing program for improving drawings. Many digital artists use this system to make beautiful images.

You can use it to draw up all kinds of tattoo designs and ideas. The program features layers, freely zoom for finer details, and a variety of other drawing tools. The Pen tool and Freeform tool can be used for drawing on a blank canvas.

There are several painting tools available in the Photoshop application. The Brush and Pencil tools are used as traditional drawing features to apply color with strokes. You can use the Eraser, Blur, and Smudge tools to modify the image further.

Making tattoo art in Photoshop is a lot more straightforward than you probably think it is.

Adobe illustrator CC

Adobe Illustrator is a magical software. Rich in features and functionalities, it provides infinite opportunities for designers to create any sort of design. The interface is intuitive, the toolset is impressive, and the number of tutorials you can refer to whenever you are stuck with your design makes it a top-choice for every designer.

you can create a tattoo vector illustration in Adobe Illustrator. it has powerful shape tools. you can make curves faster, shade with mask and blob brush, and color quickly.

Adobe Illustrator CC is an industry-standard tool in vector drawing and editing for professional design and artwork.

Rich in features and functionalities, it provides infinite opportunities for designers to create any sort of design. The interface is intuitive, the toolset is impressive, and the number of tutorials you can refer to whenever you are stuck with your design makes it a top-choice for every designer.

you can create a tattoo vector illustration in Adobe Illustrator. it has powerful shape tools. you can make curves faster, shade with mask and blob brush, and color quickly.

I have used Adobe Photoshop for sketching, Then I transfared the sketch into Adeobe Illustrator. Inking process is important for defining outer lines of your artwork. Try to crate all lines as clean as possible when inking process. This will huge impact your final result of artwork.

Medibang Paint Pro

If you're in search of a free application for tattoo drawing and design, look no further than MediBang Paint. Originally designed as a comic creation app, MediBang has evolved into a superb graphic tool that's perfect for crafting tattoos, whether for yourself or your clients.

What sets it apart is its multiplatform compatibility; you can access it on Android, iOS (for both iPhone and iPad), Windows, and macOS. And yes, it's entirely free. The app offers a versatile canvas for crafting beautiful tattoos. You can seamlessly transition your designs from your PC to your iPad or Android tablet.

MediBang even allows you to import photos, aiding in the creation and design of photo-realistic tattoos. Moreover, the app boasts a user community where you can share your work after creating an account, providing an excellent platform to showcase your art beyond the confines of traditional social media.

While the app does include ads, they don't disrupt the creative process. While it may not replace more advanced tools like Photoshop or the beloved Procreate, MediBang stands as a straightforward yet powerful drawing application that will be appreciated by tattoo enthusiasts and artists alike.

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro

Autodesk Sketchbook is one of the easiest to grasp designing/ sketching apps out there. Used by concept artists, designers, architects, and even Tattoo Artists. it is one of the go-to options for deigning.

It lets you create basic sketches and convert them into intricate designs with minimal efforts. It is opted by professionals looking for clarity and speed when working on their stylistic projects.

Users can also capture ideas on the go since the software lets users use device cameras as scanners.

It helps digital artists and illustrators design with professional-grade perspective tools and intuitive user interface.

Works with graphics tablets. Changing the size of the brush is very intuitive - this operation can be performed using a keyboard shortcut or a special toolbox.

It is a popular app suitable for all systems - iOS, Mac OS, Windows and Android. You can sketch, draw, and paint on any platform it's badass !

Final Verdict

We recommend some drawing tablets guide for tattoo artists who wanting to learn or improve designing tattoos in this article.

Some drawing tablets are ideal for beginners while others boast advanced features and technology that are suitable for professionals.

I'm a professional artist and for me, a PC and dedicated drawing tablet like XPPen is an absolute must, while the iPad is nice to have but not necessary.