SINCE 2021 · ANTWERP
Rien drew 4,000 flash sheets before she taught Inke to draw one.
This is the long version of a small story. A used bookstore on Kloosterstraat, a grandmother's book of Jerry flash, fourteen years behind a machine by the Scheldt, a quiet burnout, a very patient black cat, and the tiny tool that eventually became Inke. If you want the short version, it is on the homepage.
The flash book.
Rien's grandmother kept a hardback book of 1960s Sailor Jerry flash sheets that she had bought, in the 1970s, from a used bookstore on Kloosterstraat in Antwerp. Rien found it behind a pile of photo albums when she was thirteen and traced every single page with tracing paper and a 2B pencil. She still has the tracings, and she still has the book. The spine is held together with linen tape.
Fourteen years behind a machine.
She apprenticed at nineteen with an old Scheldt-riverside tattooer who only took walk-ins on Tuesday afternoons and refused to work from phone photos. Fourteen years later, she had drawn over 4,000 flash sheets by hand, specialized in traditional American and Belgian folk motifs, and built a reputation for tattoos that still read clean at twenty years old. That was the whole education. There was no school.
Why Inke started.
In 2021 she got tired. Tired of sending clients Instagram references that never matched their skin tone, tired of explaining why a dark fine-line piece would turn into a smudge on warm undertones, tired of forty-minute consults that still ended in confusion. So she built a tiny sketching tool for her own shop. It was called Inke because her cat's name is Tinta and the two words rhymed in her head. That is the whole origin story.
Why it went quiet.
She ran it alone, from the same room she tattooed out of, for two years. It was never meant to be a startup. Then in 2024 she burned out properly, the real kind, the kind where you stop drawing, and she took the whole year off. No emails, no machine, just long walks along the Scheldt and a lot of reading. In January 2026 she came back with a cleaner version and opened the door again.
What Tinta thinks.
Tinta is a black cat with one slightly torn left ear and very strong opinions about keyboards. She sat on the space bar for most of the rebuild, which is why the first three versions of Inke accepted only lowercase prompts. Rien fixed that eventually. Tinta remains unconvinced. She is, by all accounts, the real creative director.
Where the studio is now.
One room above a fabric shop on Dageraadplaats, in the Zurenborg quarter of Antwerp. A wooden drawing table by the window, a tattoo machine on a folded clean cloth, a laptop that is a little too warm, a half-dead cactus, and Tinta on the radiator. That is it. No team, no office, no investor deck, no "series A", no pivot. Just a tattooer who learned how to teach a computer to draw.
A NOTE FROM THE SHOP
if you are reading this, thanks. i built inke so people would stop getting tattoos they regret. i did not build it to be famous, or to raise money, or to change the world. i built it because i got tired of watching good ideas get tattooed badly. if it helps you, great. if it does not, tell me and i will fix it.
Rien · Antwerp · 2026
Come say hello.
The door on Dageraadplaats is open Saturdays, 14h to 18h. If that is far, send a note. Rien reads every one.