Best FiveM Tattoo Shop Script in 2026

What a FiveM tattoo shop script actually has to do

Six things, and only six. The catalogue has to be complete and browsable, because a player who cannot find the sleeve they saw on someone else will assume your shop is broken. Preview has to happen on the player's own ped, with a camera that can actually reach the zone being inked, since a tattoo on the lower back is invisible from a front-facing menu. Ownership has to persist per character and reapply on load, because decorations are wiped whenever the ped model changes and a shop that forgets is a shop players stop paying. Removal has to exist in both forms, one tattoo and all of them, and both have to be priced. Pricing and access gating have to be resolved on the server, so a spoofed callback cannot hand itself the VIP collection. And whatever the player ends up wearing has to be visible to everyone else on the server.

That last requirement sounds obvious and is the one that quietly separates the market. Applying an overlay to your own ped is a one-line native call. Getting that overlay onto every other client is a different problem, and it is the reason custom tattoos are rare while catalogue shops are everywhere.

The catalogue is the same catalogue

GTA V stores tattoos as ped decorations, grouped into overlay collections with names like mpbusiness_overlays, mpairraces_overlays and mpheist_overlays. Every script in this comparison reads from that same set, which is why the tattoo count on a product page tells you far less than it looks like it does. The counts are not even measured the same way: illenium-appearance stores one entry per design with a male hash and a female hash side by side and reaches 869 across 23 collections, esx_tattooshop lists 264 entries with each gender variant written out separately, spread over 10 menu categories of which two are empty, and Var-TattooShop V2 counts 1,591 across 25 collections. Nobody is lying. They are counting different things.

So use the count as a completeness check rather than a ranking. If a script is sitting at a couple of hundred entries, it stopped updating before several DLCs landed, which is exactly what happened to esx_tattooshop in January 2020. If it is in the high hundreds or above, it has the vanilla set and the number is a counting convention. What is worth reading instead is the zone list, because a shop with 6 zones has folded the back into the torso and a shop with 7 keeps them apart, which changes where a design can be placed.

Addon tattoos, image import and freehand ink

Once the vanilla set is a commodity, the only way to sell a tattoo shop is ink that is not in the game. There are two routes and they solve the same problem from opposite ends. The addon route ships the artwork as a streamed asset: rcore includes a generator that turns PNG images into addon tattoo collections, and illenium-appearance carries a Config.RCoreTattoosCompatibility flag precisely because those packs became a small ecosystem of their own. The artwork is fixed, the server owner chooses it, and every client downloads it like any other stream.

The player-generated route inverts that. MxLoL Tattoos Shop V2 lets a player paste an image link and wear it. Var-TattooShop V2 adds an imported PNG straight from the player's own PC, up to 6 images on the body at once, plus freehand painting with a brush and eraser, a colour picker with presets and recent colours, brush size, opacity, edge softness, a stroke stabilizer, a mirror axis and undo or redo. The hard part is not the drawing tool. It is making the result exist for everybody else, and the honest version of that pipeline looks like this.

Two consequences follow from that fourth step and they are worth understanding before you buy anything in this category. The slot pool is finite, so custom ink has a ceiling that vanilla tattoos do not have. And the moment players supply the artwork, you have inherited a moderation job: caps on payload size stop someone crashing the server, they do not stop someone drawing something you will have to explain to your community. Access gating per mode helps, because you can leave freehand switched off or reserve it for a group, but the decision is yours to make rather than the script's.

The business and job layer

The other axis, and the one that justifies the top of the price band, is turning the parlour into a place someone works. A catalogue shop is a vending machine: walk up, pick, pay, leave. A business layer makes the chair a job, with an owner taking the margin, employees on the payroll and a minigame that puts a second player at the other end of the needle. rcore is the only product in this comparison that ships the whole set, and it is the reason its 40.00 EUR listing sits above everything else here.

Whether that is worth 40 EUR depends entirely on player count. A tattooist job needs someone willing to sit in a shop waiting for customers, which works on a server with a populated city and is dead weight on one where the parlour sees four visits a night. The same question decides most of the venue-versus-mechanics purchases across this site, and it is the same answer every time: a business layer nobody staffs is an expensive empty room.

Fitting your appearance stack

A tattoo shop never owns the player skin on its own. Something already does, and the shop has to write into it or the ink disappears on reconnect. In practice that is esx_skin on plain ESX, qb-clothing on QBCore, or fivem-appearance and illenium-appearance on a large share of modern servers, and any tattoo script worth buying names all four. If your appearance system is still undecided, the best FiveM clothing store script guide covers that layer properly, including why illenium-appearance keeps showing up as both a free competitor and a dependency.

Two neighbouring decisions are worth settling at the same time. The first is the character creator, because tattoos applied at creation and tattoos bought in a shop have to survive the same load path, and the character creator comparison works through it. The second is whether you need the code. In this category the premium is brutal: icTattooShop lists its open source tier at 91.96 EUR against 33.88 EUR for the escrowed build, a 2.71x multiplier for the same script, which is the sort of number the escrow versus open source guide exists to help you argue about.

The FiveM tattoo shop market in September 2026

One disclaimer before the table, and it is a big one. Only three prices here were read from a page we could actually open: the two free repositories on GitHub, and Rarx Tattoos at 39.99 EUR on rarxnetwork.com. Every other store page in this category, rcore, Sotek, DeeP-Scripts, MxLoL and the icTattooShop store, sits behind a Cloudflare challenge that returns 403 to any automated request, so those figures come from the vendors' own Cfx.re release threads and store listings and are marked unconfirmed in the table. Check them on the vendor page before you budget anything, and expect the seasonal discounts these stores run to move them again.

Read down that table and the shape of the market is clear. The bottom two rows are free and one of them, illenium-appearance, is a better catalogue than several of the paid entries above it, so anyone buying a plain shop should be able to say out loud what they are getting for the money. The middle of the table, from Sotek through Rarx, is presentation: opacity sliders, animated NPCs, a Gabz map config, images shipped for every tattoo. Those are real improvements and none of them changes what the player ends up wearing. Only the last three rows sell something the vanilla catalogue cannot do at all, and they split cleanly: rcore sells the shop as a business and an addon pipeline, Var-TattooShop V2 sells ink the player makes themselves.

Where Var-TattooShop V2 fits, honestly

Var-TattooShop V2 is a studio with three creation modes. The first is the catalogue: 1,591 vanilla tattoos across 25 GTA collections, each with a preview thumbnail, sorted by zone and searchable by name or collection. The second is image mode, where a player imports a PNG from their own PC or picks from a server-side catalog you preload, drags it onto the body and resizes it, up to 6 images at once. The third is freehand, a brush and eraser with a colour picker, brush size, opacity, edge softness, a stroke stabilizer, a mirror axis and undo or redo, with the cursor projected onto the skinned freemode mesh through an offscreen WebGL ID pass so the stroke lands on the exact engine canvas texel and the preview matches the result. Everything is previewed on a clone with orbit, pan and zoom and click-to-select across 7 zones. Pricing and access are administered in game on /tattooadmin, with a cascade that resolves single tattoo, then collection, then zone, then the mode default, bulk pricing per zone or collection, and mode toggles that take effect without a restart. It runs on ESX, QBCore and standalone, persists per character through oxmysql with tables created on start, ships EN, FR and ES locales, and puts 6 shops on the map with interaction auto-detecting var-interact, then ox_target, then a marker.

Now the honest part, and it is a long list. There is no business layer at all: no ownable shop, no employees, no tattooist job, no minigame that lets one player ink another, and no temporary henna that expires. rcore ships every one of those at 40.00 EUR and is simply the better product if that is what you came for. There is no addon tattoo pipeline either, so artwork outside the vanilla set has to come from a player rather than from a pack you curate, which is again rcore's ground with its addon tattoo generator. The caps are real and you should plan around them: 24 global custom slots and 3 simultaneously inked zones per player, both configurable but both finite, against a catalogue shop where vanilla tattoos consume no slot and there is nothing to run out of. Letting players import images from their own PC hands you a moderation job that no catalogue shop has, and the server-side limits on strokes, points, image count, image bytes and total payload protect the server rather than your community standards. Opacity in V2 is a freehand brush setting; Rarx sells 5 opacity levels applied to the catalogue itself at 39.99 EUR, and icTattooShop ships an opacity slider, so if you want to fade a vanilla overlay those are the products documented for it. Locales are EN, FR and ES, where rcore claims most tattoo names translated into every language GTA supports. And no MLO adaptation ships in the box, while Sotek includes a Gabz map configuration and DeeP-Scripts advertises Gabz compatibility.

What you get in exchange is the thing nobody else in the table sells: ink the player made, visible to the whole server through the decoration system rather than as a local overlay, with the pricing and the gating resolved on the server and administered from inside the game. And unlike Var-TattooShop V1, V2 is published in all three Tebex variants, escrow, partially open and open source, so the caps, the cascade and the UI theme in variables.css are yours to edit.

Var-TattooShop V2A tattoo studio with three modes: 1,591 vanilla tattoos across 25 collections, imported PNGs, and freehand painting on the ped, all replicated to every player through the engine decoration system.View the script

Var-TattooShop V1 or V2

Both are still sold and they are not the same product, so this is worth settling before you reach the checkout. V1 is a catalogue shop and a good one: 693 tattoos across 6 body zones with gender-specific variants, live preview on your own ped with per-zone camera auto-zoom and left or right rotation, an individual price per tattoo, a remove-all option on a configurable multiplier, cash or bank payment, persistence in a JSON column that reapplies on load, 6 configurable shop locations and a React interface with a translatable locale file. It runs on ESX and QBCore and supports esx_skin, qb-clothing, fivem-appearance and illenium-appearance.

Two differences decide it. The first is scope: V2 replaces the menu with a studio, adds image import and freehand drawing, moves from 6 zones to 7, from 693 tattoos to 1,591, adds standalone support and moves pricing out of the config into an in-game admin panel. The second is code access, and it is the one people miss: V1 is sold as an escrow build only, while V2 ships in all three variants including full open source. So if you want a cheaper catalogue shop, never intend to let players draw, and can live with escrow, V1 is the honest answer and it is the less expensive of the two. If you want custom ink, standalone support, in-game price administration or editable source, it has to be V2.

Picking one for your server

Three questions, in this order. Do you want the parlour to be a job? If yes, this is a short list of one and rcore wins it at 40.00 EUR. Do you want players creating their own artwork? If yes, the list is Var-TattooShop V2 and MxLoL Tattoos Shop V2, and the follow-up question is whether you are prepared to moderate what appears on peds, because that work does not go away. If both answers are no, you want a catalogue, and the correct starting point is illenium-appearance at zero, with 869 tattoos and 6 shops, since anything you pay for after that has to beat free on presentation alone.

Then test before you commit. Install on a development server, put two clients side by side and confirm the second one sees what the first one applied, change ped model or reconnect and check the ink comes back, and watch the resmon value while the studio interface is open rather than only while idle. If you are still assembling the rest of the appearance stack, the best FiveM scripts guide covers the neighbouring categories.

Related: Best FiveM clothing store script · Best FiveM character creator · Escrow vs open source