Every artist and every shop on Tattoo Review has a big italic number on their profile: a percentage of clients who said, at the end of their review, they'd book with that artist again. We put it where a star rating usually goes. On purpose.
Here's why.
Five-star averages lie
Yelp taught us how five-star averages break. Everyone's a 4.6. The bad ones are 3.8. The great ones are 4.8. It compresses almost every experience worth having into a one-point band that means nothing. And the number on either end — the outraged 1-star and the ecstatic 5-star — are the loudest but often the least representative.
Star averages also punish complicated work. A back piece that heals into something the client loves after a year of settling is going to get a lower average than a small ankle piece from the same artist that was easy to love the day it was done. Star averages measure vibes. They don't measure the artist.
"Would you rebook?" measures the artist
"Would you rebook with this artist?" is a yes-or-no question. There is no middle. Every reviewer has to make an actual decision. It bypasses the four-vs-five paralysis, and it drops a ton of signal into a single binary.
Here's what makes it powerful:
- It captures the whole experience — the consult, the sitting, the aftercare, the healed result — in one commitment.
- It's a decision the reviewer would actually make in their real life. They're voting with the next time they walk into a shop, not with a slider on a website.
- It's harder to game than a star average. A shop can't nudge a happy client toward 5 stars instead of 4. They can only ask, and the client answers.
How we calculate it
The rebook percentage is exactly what it says. Of all the verified reviews on an artist or a shop, what percentage answered "yes" to "would you rebook."
No weighting. No time decay. No bonus for recency. If Elena Wren has 247 reviews and 232 of them said "yes," she's at 93.9% and we round it to 94.
We do require a minimum number of verified reviews (currently 10) before we display the number. Below that threshold, a single review would swing the value too dramatically to be meaningful.
What a good rebook number actually looks like
Our data across ~8,000 verified reviews:
- Median artist: 86% would rebook.
- Top 10% of artists: 94% or higher.
- Top 1%: 97% or higher.
- Below 75%: Something in the client experience is systematically not landing.
Note that this scale runs tighter than star-average scales do. A rebook number of 88 already puts you above the median. A rebook number of 95 puts you in the top-tier band nationally. The difference between a 90 and a 96 is enormous and meaningful, not marginal.
What it doesn't measure
The rebook number is the top-line signal, but it isn't the whole story. That's why we still show:
— Six granular sub-scores per review (hygiene, vibe, pain management, line integrity, color retention, price transparency).
— Heal-time-filtered healed photos so you can see how the actual work ages.
— Verified reviewer badges and reviewer history so you can weigh whose "yes" matters most for your kind of project.
Rebook is the first question we want you to look at. The sub-scores are the diagnostic tools you use if the rebook number looks off from the healed photos you're seeing.
The takeaway
If we could only show you one number, it would be the rebook percentage. In a category where everyone has a 4.8 on Yelp, we wanted a metric that told you the truth: this artist did work, on a real client, and at the end of the whole experience, that client would spend money there again.
Everything else on the profile is context. This is the question.
