Joining through me? Explore your free growth resources and practical help: clarify your offer, put your client stories to work and choose your next action.
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
What you get when you join through me
Use my free GCT worksheet, Money Tree checklist and Second Ring AI prompt to connect your business goal, client stories and relationships to a practical next step. Start with the resources today.
If you run an established U.S. home or property-service business, or an agency serving one, bring one public example and one growth question to our free written-review pilot for businesses joining through my link. For accepted cases, my team sends one focused action card: the priority, evidence, task and result to check, plus one follow-up clarification. We confirm fit and availability by email.
See your benefits, use the starter kit and bring us your example. I may earn a commission from eligible Whop activity through my referral.
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.