The problem The Ossuary solves

Onboarding: TAs can revitalize NFT Art. TAs are prolific creators of unique art; tattooing & drawing 12+ hours a day.
TCs value high-quality art for permanent tattoos.

Tattoos: A natural progression for NFTs. Web3 & Crypto adoption comes from everyday people understanding & engaging with digital ownership. I've tattooed everyone from 18 to 80-year-olds, Doctors to Farmers. Expanding into NFTs with tattooing creates a new market for tattoo art collecting while teaching the everyday person about Web3 and crypto with real-world value. An intersection of Web3 & Webs-on-elbows. Onboarding TAs & TCs will also revive & reform the digital collectible market.

Exposure for TAs: The Ossuary proves TAs can sell flash without doing the tattoo. Combined with generative art, TAs can create vast quantities of unique, hand-drawn artwork for collectors, providing initial income from selling art, market exposure, & income from doing the tattoo. With Web2/Social Media limiting engagement, Web3 & digital collections can showcase our work & its popularity. I see a future where TAs use mints & secondary volume as success & quality measures, akin to likes & comments.

NFTs?: Show a real-world use for digital ownership. In the ol'days, TAs traded & sold flash sheets to each other. This died out because of art theft, Pinterest, Google etc. Bringing tattooing to the blockchain revives core practices. With NFTs of tattoo flash, blockchain can prove provenance. TAs can create flash & store it on-chain, then sell it to collectors & other artists. This opens up a wider audience, building supportive communities of artists creating, selling flash, & tattooing each other's artwork worldwide.

No-Code Solutions: I created the project on Fair.xyz to show TAs they can do the same with no-code platforms. Instead of using a bespoke platform like I've done before (inkpass.io), I used Fair for The Ossuary because it's a very intuitive no-code platform to show my fellow TAs they could do it too.

Challenges I ran into

Creating a Collection in 3 Weeks: Developed a tattoo flash collection with high quality & wide uniqueness in under 3 weeks.
Spent 115 hours drawing: mornings before tattooing, during lunch, & all night.
Created nearly 100 traits, resulting in 72,000ish unique pieces, with 1,000 generated for the collection.
Designed & printed banner artwork, t-shirts, merch, leaflets, & business cards.

Convention Sales & Attention: The main problem was centralized banking. On Day 1, we engaged potential collectors about the benefits of Web3, digital ownership, & the rights of owning thier flash pieces. Despite good interest, only 12 out of 100+ potential buyers could mint due to banks like NatWest and Monzo refusing transactions.
Signal: The venue made it difficult for potential collectors to complete transactions. Business cards with QR links helped, but many did not return after leaving to find signal.
Fair.xyz: Site Bugs.

Solutions: On Saturday, I printed 100 designs & put them in black envelopes. Buyers paid in cash then selected a random envelope, maintaining the minting concept. Collectors provided email addresses for airdropping their flash later. This resulted in 70+ sales.

Future Enhancements: I Plan to run the project again, leveraging invitations from The Tattoo Expo UK, Big London Tattoo Show, and The Richmond Tattoo Convention.
Use NFC to assign digital collectibles to physical prints, ensuring a tangible item for collectors.
Incentivizing NFT collection (from the NFC) through token-gated merch on Shopify.
Create a dedicated tattoo flash dApp to avoid issues faced with Fair.xyz & open it to other artists.
Hire another TA to manage tattooing, allowing me to focus on explaining Web3, NFTs, & generative art.
Tattooing is a logical step for Web3. Tattooing has long been the domain of free thinkers, renegades, & punks. With the right approach, the potential for tattooing in Web3 is huge.The Ossuary is just the beginning. I want to build —on base, on chain, on skin.