Tracing Templates for Temporary Tattoos

A year ago we booked our family's first Disney Cruise. One of the traditions on Caribbean Disney cruises is a pirate night when they let passengers dress like pirates for some pirate-y activities. So I wanted to dress like a pirate.

One of the things that I wanted as part of my costume was tattoos. But I didn't want permanent tattoos. I didn't even want the tattoos to last as long as temporary tattoo stickers sometimes do. But I found temporary tattoo markers. These wash off pretty easily so they'd work for my purposes.

But I don't trust myself to draw freehand art well on myself. So I wanted to make stencils. The plan is this: I design nerdy, Disney-esque stencils on my computer, print them out with my 3d printer, and on pirate night, use the stencils and the temporary tattoo markers to give myself fake tattoos.

1. Computer
2. Preferred vector graphics editor program (Affinity Designer, Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator)
3. 3d modeling program (Blender)
4. 3d slicer (Cura)
5. Many reference images
6. 3d printer
7. PLA filament
8. Temporary tattoo markers

Design whatever shapes you want! But remember that the shapes will be cutouts in a stencil sheet. So closed shapes will fall out. There are several designs I made where I added bridges to keep the stencil together, but when I use the stencils, I'm going to stop tracing at the gap, remove the stencil, and then fill in the gap.

Once you have the design you like, export the image as an SVG. Import the SVG into Blender. Convert the shape from a curves object to a mesh object. Enter edit mode and select all the faces. Extrude the faces by some amount greater than you intend for the stencil to end up.

Enter object mode and create a cube. Give it the dimensions you want for your stencil sheet. The stencil sheets above for example are 100mm by 100mm by .4mm or .6mm (.4 will mean 2 printed layers, .6 will mean 3 printed layers.) The thicker the print is, the stronger it'll be. But the thinner the print is, the more flexible it'll be and the easier it'll be to trace on your skin.

Add a Boolean modifier to your stencil sheet cube. If you added all of your shapes to a collection, choose collection instead of object, and identify the collection to subtract.

Export your sheet from Blender as an STL. Choose "Selection only" and "Apply Modifiers."

Import your STL into your slicer. Make sure that it's the size you expect.

Slice the stencil sheet and then print on your printer. When it's finished: very carefully peel it from the print bed. Test out your favorite shape.