Summary. Dean’s Illegal Tattoos is Dean Hopkins’s tattoo business in Austin, Texas. He used to sell individual stencils to followers through DMs and Venmo, Cash App or PayPal, one transaction at a time. On Whop he sells stencil access as a subscription at $15 a month, $40 a year or a lifetime tier, delivered through a gated Files app and listed on Whop’s Discover marketplace. If you run a tattoo studio with followers who will never sit in your chair, this is the mechanism to copy.
What Dean’s Illegal Tattoos was doing before Whop
A tattoo is sold by the hour, in one city. Hopkins had followers overseas who could not travel to Austin, so the only thing he could sell them was a stencil, and he sold those one at a time through DMs and Venmo, Cash App or PayPal.
When I started full time tattooing I knew that you’re trading time for money, so scaling isn’t as easy as other industries.
Dean Hopkins, Dean’s Illegal Tattoos
A DM sale creates no ongoing relationship. The buyer pays once, gets a file, and disappears.
What changed on Whop
Hopkins noticed that buyers wanted more than one stencil, so he priced access instead of files: $15 a month, $40 a year, or lifetime. Whop’s Files app gates the downloads behind the subscription, and Whop’s checkout takes cards, buy-now-pay-later, digital wallets and crypto.
The listing on Whop’s Discover marketplace puts the product in front of people who did not arrive from his Instagram bio. Whop’s write-up does not state how many subscribers came from Discover versus his own audience.
It’s extremely passive. I just upload the stencils that I used and whenever I drop new designs, have the link in my bio and people buy it.
Dean Hopkins
The numbers
The tiers are $15 a month, $40 a year, and lifetime access. Whop’s write-up cites the U.S. tattoo industry growing at a 10.9% compound annual rate.
Whop’s write-up does not publish subscriber counts or revenue for Dean’s Illegal Tattoos. On financing, it lists buy-now-pay-later among the checkout options with no provider or terms stated, so treat that as a checkout convenience rather than a financing story.
What I would tell a tattoo studio owner to copy
Your stencils and flash are already a product. The question is whether you sell them once through a DM or as access that renews. Hopkins picked renewal because buyers wanted multiple designs; check your own DMs for the same pattern.
Measure the link in your bio. Put Google Analytics 4 and Tag Manager on a page you own, tag the link with UTM parameters, and set the subscription click as a conversion event. Then you know whether a reel produced subscribers or only likes.
Get proof on your own domain. One canonical page for each design series, with healed photos, the client’s first name with permission, and the stencil that produced it. Search Console will show you which series people actually search for.
Put a Dollar-a-Day boost behind the reel that already gets saves and shares, not the one you like best, and send it to that page. Seven days, one dollar a day, then decide.
Who this is not for
Whop is a checkout, financing, affiliate and storefront layer. It does not run your appointment book, your consent forms or your bookkeeping, so keep those where they are. The base rate is 2.7% + 30¢, 20 basis points under Stripe’s 2.9% + 30¢, but the optional layers (managed tax 2%, orchestration 0.8%, billing 0.5%) can push the stack above Stripe. Financing requires $30,000 processed from 10 or more customers in 90 days and a dispute rate under 2%, and it is unavailable to gambling, sports betting, trading signals, credit offers and adult categories. If your following is local and your chair is booked, a subscription is a side product, not the business.
If you were going to use Whop anyway
If you were going to sign up for Whop anyway, sign up through my link, dennisyu.com/go/whop, or send me your business name and email and I will submit the referral. Whop pays me a share of its profit on your account; your rate is the same 2.7% + 30¢ either way. In return my team at Local Service Spotlight sets up the AI agents that audit your public reputation, fix what they find, and keep it maintained: a personal brand analysis, Google Analytics 4, Tag Manager and Search Console with conversion events that actually fire, a Content Factory that turns one recording into a definitive article, clips and posts, and a weekly Metrics, Analysis, Action report. That is the work we normally charge tattoo businesses for.
Source and disclosure
This story is retold from Whop’s own write-up, How Dean’s tattoo business took a location-based service and made it borderless with Whop (2026-02-18, modified 2026-06-25), which you should read in full. I am a Whop partner and earn a share of Whop’s profit from businesses that sign up through my link. Whop did not pay for or review this article. See Whop for tattoo artists for the other tattoo studio stories and my full notes on what Whop costs, and my main Whop page for the partner program.