The Church Tattoo

The brief

Converted Victorian schoolhouse in Wythall, just south of Birmingham. Ten resident artists, founded 2016, a waitlist built off Instagram with nowhere serious to send anyone. End-to-end build from the brand up.

What we did

• 17 prerendered routes — home, artists index, 10 artist detail pages, studio, aftercare, testimonials, contact
• Brand from scratch — warm-black, off-white, single gold. Frank Ruhl Libre + Manrope. Cross mark via CSS mask of the studio's own logo
• Hero intro: stroke-drawn SVG cross, elevator-door reveal, morphs to the nav. Fires once per session
• Magazine-format artist pages — 100vh layout, floated portrait with bio wrap on desktop. Direct mailto, pre-filled, addressed to each artist by name
• Full SEO + GEO scaffold — JSON-LD entity graph, llms.txt, sitemap, robots, Search Console verified. Lighthouse 96 SEO · 100 a11y · 100 best-practice
• Domain transfer at names.co.uk without disturbing the studio's hosts.co.uk mailbox. A + CNAME only, nameservers untouched
• Email signature + install guide at /signature, mobile-tested light and dark. Handover doc at /handover

The numbers

Gallery

What we said no to

• The aesthetic reflex. Gothic typefaces, dripping ink textures, biker fonts. The studio is a Victorian schoolhouse with ten serious artists. The site reads as that, not as someone's idea of what a tattoo brand looks like.
• The CMS reflex. WordPress, because someone's cousin can update it. The studio's content changes twice a year — pages, artists, address. A daily-publish CMS would have been overhead, not infrastructure. Single source of truth in TypeScript, we ship the changes when they need them.
• The booking-widget reflex. Every modern studio site funnels enquiries through a SaaS form into a CRM. The Church works on relationships — an actual person answers the email. Booking goes straight to mailto, addressed to the artist by name, pre-filled. No middleware between client and ink.

Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router, Turbopack)
• React 19
• TypeScript 5
• Tailwind v4 (oklch design tokens via @theme inline)
• GSAP + ScrollTrigger
• Lenis
• SplitType
• Vercel