How to Make a Tattoo Stencil in Procreate (iPad Workflow)

Procreate is a good place to draw a tattoo stencil and a poor place to print one. The drawing half is straightforward once the canvas is set up at the right size and resolution; the printing half is where most Procreate stencils go wrong, because nothing in the app knows or cares how many centimeters wide your design is meant to be on paper. Here is the workflow that keeps both halves honest.

The Procreate stencil workflow, in order

1. Set the canvas to the finished size at 300 dpi. From the gallery, create a custom canvas, switch the units to centimeters or inches, type the tattoo’s real width and height and set the DPI to 300. A 15 × 10 cm design comes out around 1,770 × 1,180 px. Decide the size before you draw — the stencil size calculator helps if the client has only given you a body area.
2. Import the reference. Insert the photo or sketch on its own layer, scale it to fill the design area and rotate it to the angle it will sit on the body.
3. Fade the reference. Drop that layer’s opacity to roughly 25 to 40 percent. You want to see the shapes, but a black line drawn over the top must stand out sharply.
4. Trace on a new layer. Add a layer above the reference, pick an even-width inking brush in pure black and trace. One layer for outlines; a second for interior detail if you want to switch it on and off later.
5. Hide the reference and check the lines alone. This is the moment you find the gaps, the doubled strokes and the bits you sketched but never meant to tattoo.
6. Export a PNG with the reference and background hidden. You get black lines on a transparent background and nothing else.
7. Print at true size and measure. Scaling off, 100 percent, ruler on the paper. Then transfer.

Steps 1 and 7 decide whether the stencil fits the client. Everything in between decides whether it transfers cleanly.

Canvas size and resolution

At 300 dpi there are about 118 pixels per centimeter (300 per inch). That number matters because stencil lines are thin: a typical stencil line is 0.3 to 0.5 mm on paper, which at 300 dpi is roughly 4 to 6 pixels wide. Drop the canvas to 150 dpi and the same line is two or three pixels, which prints with visibly stepped edges and breaks up on transfer paper. Push it to 600 dpi and the line is crisp, but Procreate’s layer limit falls as the canvas grows, and on an older iPad a large high-resolution canvas can leave you with only a handful of layers.

Set the canvas to the design, not to the paper. If the forearm piece is 18 cm tall, make an 18 cm canvas, not a US Letter page with the design floating in the middle. That way the canvas edge is a known measurement, and you can use it later to check the print. A small, practical trick: draw a short tick mark in each corner of the canvas on its own layer. When the stencil prints, the distance between the ticks should equal the canvas size you typed. Turn that layer off before the final export if you do not want the ticks on the transfer.

If the reference is a low-resolution photo, a high-dpi canvas does not add detail; it only gives you a smoother surface to trace on. Below roughly 1000 px on the reference’s long edge you are redrawing the subject, not tracing it.

Brushes, opacity and line discipline

The stencil is a guide for the needle, not the finished tattoo, so the goal is a single, decisive black line wherever the artist will pull a line. Use an even-width, untextured brush: Studio Pen or Technical Pen from the Inking set, or Monoline from the Calligraphy set. Set the color to pure black, not near-black. Textured brushes — pencils, charcoals, anything with grain — leave soft grey edges, and grey is exactly what does not transfer.

Keep line weight consistent. Pressure-sensitive tapering looks good on screen, but a line that thins to a hair at its tips can vanish under stencil solution. If you like the look of pressure, trace with it and then check the thinnest points at full zoom. The brush’s StreamLine setting smooths hand wobble on long curves; raise it for flowing outlines and lower it for small, tight detail. QuickShape (hold the Pencil at the end of a stroke) snaps lines and arcs clean, which helps with geometric work.

Leave shading out of the line layer. Mark where shadows begin with a single line or a dotted boundary, the way a tattooer would, rather than painting soft tone that will print as pale mush. Why stencil lines break up covers the line-weight failures in more detail, and they apply to Procreate output exactly as they do to anything else.

Before exporting, hide the reference layer and the background color, zoom to 100 percent and pan across the whole design. Close every gap that is not intentional, delete doubled strokes where you went over a line twice, and erase stray marks. Anything you leave becomes a purple mark on skin.

Exporting and printing at true size

Export from the Actions menu as a PNG with the reference and background layers hidden; Procreate exports the visible layers, so the file holds black lines on transparency. Keep the .procreate file too, so you can return to the layers.

This is where Procreate stops helping. It has no stencil print layout: no setting that says “this design is 18 cm tall on paper”, no tiling for designs larger than a sheet, no check ruler. A PNG carries pixels, not page dimensions, and whichever app prints it decides the scale. Many print dialogs default to fitting the image to the page, which can enlarge a small design or shrink a large one by a few percent to clear the margins. Turn off every fit or scale option you can find, print at 100 percent, and measure the corner ticks or the design itself against a ruler. If it is wrong, reprint; never transfer a stencil you have not measured. How to print a tattoo stencil at home covers the printer settings and paper handling in full.

If the design is bigger than one sheet, you will need to split it across pages by hand, with overlap and alignment marks you draw yourself — tedious, and easy to get wrong by a few millimeters at each seam.

Where InkLine fits alongside Procreate

InkLine does not replace Procreate’s drawing tools, and does not try to; it has four brushes and no layers or blend modes. It is useful at the two ends of this workflow.

At the start, if your reference is a photo, InkLine’s six stencil modes can extract a first pass of linework locally on the device. Export that as a PNG with a transparent background (lines only) and drop it into Procreate as a layer above the photo. You then edit and redraw instead of tracing from nothing. Expect to redraw: an extraction reads the photo literally, and the editorial choices are still yours.

At the end, bring the finished PNG back into InkLine to print. You type the stencil’s width or height in centimeters or inches, choose US Letter, US Legal, Tabloid, A4 or A3, and the lines print at that size, with a 5 cm check ruler on every sheet. Designs too large for one page tile across up to 3 × 3 sheets with overlap and registration marks — see printing a stencil larger than one page. It prints through AirPrint or exports a PDF; it does not replace a dedicated thermal stencil printer for shop-volume work.

InkLine is a free download. The manual stencil workflow of processing, editing, print layout and export is free up to an allowance on how many images you carry through it, and needs a subscription past that allowance; AI generation uses a credit system and needs a network connection.

Procreate on iPad and iPhone

Procreate runs on iPad only. As of October 2026 it is a $12.99 paid download in the US App Store and needs iPadOS 16.3 or later. On iPhone the equivalent is a separate app, Procreate Pocket, at $5.99. Pocket works for tracing a small design, but a phone screen makes clean, controlled linework harder, and most artists who draw stencils digitally do it on an iPad with an Apple Pencil.