Eine Liebe Tätowiergeschäft
Website and CMS for a tattoo studio in Bochum
A flash sheet that keeps growing.
Eine Liebe is a private tattoo studio in Bochum, established in 2002. Four artists, one shared attitude: traditional tattooing, clean lines, motifs made to last. Traditional, maritime, blackwork, Asia, pin-ups.
The brief: a presence that puts the work and the people behind it front and centre. One that feels like the studio itself — warm and calm, without tattoo clichés. One that gets found in Bochum and across the Ruhr area. And above all: one the studio can maintain itself, without calling anyone for every new picture.
01 — Approach
Traditional tattooing has a visual language of its own: flash sheets on the wall, printed on heavy paper, a handful of strong colours. That is exactly where the design comes from. A warm paper tone as the ground, deep ink black for text and lines, plus an oxblood red, a dark petrol and a muted gold — the colours you know from old flash motifs.
The typography follows the same logic. Fraunces, a serif with character, for headlines and quotes. Hanken Grotesk, matter-of-fact and highly legible, for everything meant to inform. Both typefaces are self-hosted instead of loaded from Google — faster, and one privacy question less.
02 — The homepage as a walkthrough
The hero says what this is about in two lines: “Tattoo artistry since 2002 · Bochum” and “Traditional tattooing with salt water in its veins.” Below it, two clear paths: request an appointment or browse the gallery. Anyone who wants more simply keeps scrolling.
The homepage is not a kit of modules but a walkthrough in four numbered chapters: 01 The studio, 02 The artists, 03 Gallery, 04 Studio stories. The numbering creates rhythm and orientation, on small screens too.
The studio introduces itself as a “private studio in the heart of the Ruhr area, working with a steady hand and clean lines since 2002”. Right next to it, the most important practical information gets a block of its own: the walk-in. Every second Saturday of the month, 11 am to 4 pm, straight from the flash, first come, first served. Anyone visiting the site just for that finds the answer without searching.
On the phone, the walkthrough stays the same: same chapters, same calm, nothing trimmed away. A large share of enquiries starts on the go.
03 — Four signatures
Salle, Andre, Jill and Melissa — four people with a style of their own. Each gets a card on the homepage and a dedicated page beyond it: portrait, styles, a personal quote, a proper introduction and an individual gallery. On Jill’s page, her motto sits above everything: “Bold will hold!”
Every artist page ends with a direct path to an appointment and to their own Instagram profile. Anyone who has fallen for one signature should not have to go back to the homepage first.
Technically, all artist pages are generated from a shared template. When someone joins the team, the studio creates a new entry in the CMS and the page builds itself on the next publish.
04 — A gallery of 263 works
The centrepiece is the gallery: 263 works, filterable by ten styles and by the four artists. A click opens each image large in a lightbox, with arrows to the next piece. Images load only as they enter the viewport, keeping the page fast despite the volume.
Every work carries its own description built from motif and body placement, such as “Lighthouses with Glückauf and Moin on the calf”. You never see it while browsing — for screen readers and Google image search it is the actual content. And it is the foundation for Pinterest, more on that in chapter 08.
05 — Studio stories
A tattoo studio also lives on knowledge many people lack before their first appointment: What exactly is old school? How does a walk-in Saturday work? That is what the studio stories are for — a small journal right on the site. The first three posts: “Old school explained”, “Walk-in Saturday: how it works” and “Maritime classics from the flash”.
The stories are written as plain text files and become individually designed pages on publish. The newest post automatically appears large in the overview and as a teaser on the homepage. The sitemap for search engines updates itself.
06 — Contact without detours
“Let’s talk about your motif.” The form asks only what a first assessment needs: name, email, preferred artist and a short description of motif, placement and size. The enquiry arrives in the inbox so that one click on “Reply” goes straight to the customer.
One small detail with a big effect: if sending ever fails, the page automatically shows the direct email address. No enquiry gets lost, even when something jams behind the scenes. An invisible field keeps spam bots out without making humans solve picture puzzles.
07 — Self-maintained
The most important requirement was not a design one: the studio had to be able to maintain the site itself. The answer is a lean, git-based CMS. No database, no plugins demanding constant updates, no server of its own. Every change is stored as a version, and the site rebuilds in about a minute.
Everything that changes is editable: the gallery, the artists, the styles, the studio stories and the homepage copy. A new picture needs only a photo, artist, style, motif and placement. Image description and Pinterest copy are generated from that automatically, following the same pattern as every other work. Anyone who wants to can override them by hand.
08 — Getting found
A studio in Bochum is searched for locally first. That is why name, address and phone number are identical everywhere — on the page as well as in the structured data for search engines. Every page tells Google its canonical address, and the sitemap is registered in Search Console.
Then there is Pinterest, for many the first stop when looking for their next motif. The gallery is being mirrored there step by step: ten boards by style, every pin with its own motif title and a link back to the artist’s page. Not as a one-day mass upload, but spread across almost two weeks.
Technically, the site stays deliberately simple: static HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript, no framework, delivered through Cloudflare’s network. Lighthouse on desktop: Performance 97, Accessibility 96, Best Practices 100, SEO 100.
Outcome
The new site has been live at eine-liebe-tattoo.de since September 2026. Within days, Salle noticed a distinctly higher number of enquiries — for all four artists. The studio attributes the largest share to the search optimisation, the studio stories and the new Pinterest presence.
Gallery, artist pages and stories are maintained by the studio itself, with no technical background required. For ongoing operations, the Bochum-based digital agency .expositio is on board, working from complete technical documentation.