October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, a time when there is increased focus on spreading knowledge of the disease and how it can be detected in the early stages. Despite the mass attention on the campaign, vice president and experience director for advertising and design agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky Noel Franus believes it’s missing something.
“For all the great awareness and money raised to promote breast cancer awareness, very little of that conversation each October is focused on surviving with it. But even after you’ve ‘beaten,’ the disease it’s often left its mark in the form of unwanted scars,” Franus told the Daily Dot.
Franus sister-in-law’s own struggle with finding a creative way to cover her mastectomy scars inspired him to start the non-profit Personal Ink (P.INK), a Pinterest-based platform that shares ideas for mastectomy covering tattoos and connects survivors with tattoo artists qualified to create them. This October P.INK has taken their mission to help survivors decide on whether or not to get a mastectomy tattoo a step further with the launch of a new iPhone app called Inkspiration.
The app lets you “try on” various tattoos from an image gallery using a demo body type or a photo of yourself. It can also help connect you with an experienced tattoo artist.
“Most survivors have no idea where to begin when they consider a mastectomy tattoo, especially if they’re not a ‘tattoo person.’ We created the app over the course of a few months to demystify this—to show them what a tattoo might look like on them. And to point them towards the artists who can help them move on after a mastectomy,” Franus said.
Additional resources may be added to the app in the future, such as the ability to order temporary tattoos. Inkspiration was just released Wednesday and is only available for the iPhone right now, though an Android version is apparently in the works.
Screenshot via PersonalInkProject/YouTube
