Best FiveM Tattoo Shop Script in 2026

What the framework defaults already do

A tattoo in GTA V is a ped decoration. The script calls AddPedDecorationFromHashes with a collection hash and an overlay hash, and the game paints it on the skin. Almost everything sold as a tattoo shop is a menu over that one native, plus a table of hashes, plus somewhere to store what the player owns. Which is exactly why the free options are not demos.

On QBCore the resource most servers land on is qb-tattooshop, a community repository rather than an official qbcore-framework one. It ships a native scaleform menu with an opacity control and a camera toggle, six shop coordinates in the config, and a table of 628 tattoos. On ESX there is no framework default at all, and the resource most servers land on is illenium-appearance, which is MIT licensed, supports qb-core, ESX and ox_core, and carries six tattoo shops in the same config file as its 15 clothing stores, seven barbers and one surgeon. Both preview the tattoo on the player ped before payment, both persist what was bought, and both reapply it on load. If that is the whole requirement, stop reading and install illenium-appearance.

What neither of them does is anything past the vanilla list. There is no ink the game does not already contain, no artist job, no per-location pricing, and in the case of the free tier no maintenance either: the illenium main branch was last pushed in November 2024, the upstream fivem-appearance in February 2023, and qb-tattooshop in March 2024. Free here means finished, not abandoned, but you inherit the code.

How big the vanilla list actually is

Store pages say hundreds of tattoos. That number is worth checking, because every script freezes its own copy of the overlay table on the day it was built and Rockstar keeps adding collections with each DLC. Counted from the shipped data files rather than the sales copy: qb-tattooshop lists 628 entries across 21 collections, illenium-appearance lists 869 across 23, and Var-TattooShop V2 lists 1,591 across 25. Same game, three very different slices of it. Neither paid shop in the table below publishes a count at all, which tells you something about how comparable those numbers are.

Two details matter more than the headline figure. The first is gender. Most overlays exist twice, once per body type, and 569 of the 628 entries in qb-tattooshop carry both a male and a female hash, so the shop has to choose per ped or the art lands in the wrong place. The second is zones. The vanilla data has six of them, head, torso, and left and right arm and leg, and a back piece is filed under ZONE_TORSO. There is no back zone in GTA. Any shop offering one has defined its own, which is a genuine feature rather than a marketing line, because a player looking for a back piece will scroll through the entire torso list before finding it.

Pricing, removal and who is trusted with the number

Pricing is where these scripts differ most and say least. illenium-appearance is honest about its model: Config.TattooCost is a single value of 100, and with Config.ChargePerTattoo that becomes the cost of one tattoo everywhere on the map. A comment in the same file points at the escape hatch, a cost key per tattoo in the tattoo table, and none of the 869 shipped entries uses it. Its six tattoo shops carry coordinates, a size, a rotation and polygon points, and no price field at all, so a parlour in Vespucci charges what a parlour in Paleto charges. Per-shop pricing is close to nonexistent in this category, in the paid tier too.

qb-tattooshop goes the other way and prices each tattoo individually in AllTattoos.json, from 0 to 53,950 with a median of 6,550, then divides that by 20 in the menu before displaying it. The problem is the next line. The client passes the number it computed to the server, and the server spends it: PurchaseTattoo takes a price argument, checks the player has that much cash, and removes exactly that. Removal is looser still, since the client sends back the whole new list and the server writes it. This is not a reason to avoid the script on a small friends server, but it is a reason to read the server file of any free shop before it meets a public one.

Removal deserves a decision rather than a default. There is no native that removes one decoration, so every script clears all of them and replays the rest from the saved list. The question is whether it charges. Free removal makes tattoos a fitting room. A remove-all priced from a multiplier, which is what Var-Tattoo does, makes ink a commitment and gives your economy a sink. Neither is wrong, but the store page will not tell you which one you are buying.

Custom tattoos, addon collections and drawing

Custom tattoo means two unrelated things on store pages. The first is an addon collection: a streamed resource carrying its own texture dictionary and overlay metadata, which registers new hashes with the game. Any shop can list those if the vendor built a path for them, and it is the standard way servers get gang pieces and branded artwork. It is also work you do outside the script, in a texture editor, then ship to every player as a download.

The second is ink created in game, either an image the player imports or a drawing they make on the spot. That is a much harder problem, because a decoration is a hash and the hash has to exist before it can be applied. A script that wants player-made ink needs a pool of streamed overlay slots it can write into at runtime, and it needs every other client to resolve the same slot to the same texture, or the tattoo is a private illusion. The cost of that approach is a budget: slots are finite, so the design has to cap how many custom pieces exist per player and per server.

The FiveM tattoo shop market in September 2026

One caveat before the table, and it applies to the whole category. Most Tebex storefronts sit behind a bot check that blocks automated reads, so the paid prices below were read from the vendor release threads on the Cfx.re forum rather than from the storefront, and the source column dates each one. Where a vendor has not touched that post in years, treat the figure as the last publicly stated price rather than a current one. Free rows were read from the repositories in September 2026. No price in this table has been estimated, and products whose price could not be read anywhere are not listed.

Three things fall out of that table. The paid tier is unusually thin, roughly 18 to 40 in either currency, because nobody can charge much for a menu over a native every free script already calls. The one product charging at the top of that range is not selling tattoos at all, it is selling a job, an ownable parlour and employees, which is the same pattern seen in every mature FiveM category. And the free tier is not a stripped version of the paid one: neither NX-Store nor DeeP-Scripts publishes a catalogue count, so on the one number you can actually check, illenium-appearance at 869 is ahead of every paid shop here except Var-TattooShop V2.

Where Var-TattooShop V2 fits, honestly

Var-TattooShop V2 is built for the one gap the rest of this page keeps circling: ink the game does not ship. It runs three modes on ESX, QBCore or standalone. The first is the vanilla catalogue, 1,591 tattoos across 25 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 machine or picks from a catalogue you preload, drags it into place and keeps up to six on the body. The third is freehand, an actual brush: colour picker with presets and recents, brush size, opacity, edge softness, a stroke stabiliser, a mirror axis and undo and redo. The cursor is projected onto the skinned freemode mesh through an offscreen WebGL identifier pass, so a stroke lands on the exact engine texel and the preview does not drift from the result. Drawings and images go out through a pool of streamed overlay slots and the native decoration system, so other players see them like any vanilla tattoo.

The rest is the plumbing that keeps that from being a liability. Prices resolve in a cascade, single tattoo, then collection, then zone, then the mode default, all edited from /tattooadmin in game with no restart and no config file. A mode, a collection or one tattoo can be locked behind an ace permission or a framework group, rechecked on the server at submit rather than only in the interface. Every submit is capped before it is processed, on stroke count, points per stroke, image count, image weight and total payload, with per-source rate limits on submit, fetch and load. Persistence is per character through oxmysql with tables created on start, and the script still runs without oxmysql, simply without saving. Seven zones, so the back is its own zone rather than buried in the torso list. Six shops with blips, interaction auto detecting var-interact, then ox_target, then a marker. EN, FR and ES locales, and the interface themed from variables.css.

Now the honest part, and there is a real list of it. There is no tattooist job, no ownable parlour and no employees, which is precisely what rcore sells at 40.00 EUR, and if a player-run tattoo business is the reason you are shopping then buy that instead. There is no addon collection pipeline either: artwork outside the vanilla set has to come from a player, so if you want to commission a gang piece, stream it yourself and have it appear in the shop for everyone, rcore is again the product with the generator for that and V2 is not. Opacity is a freehand brush setting rather than a control on the vanilla overlays, so if what you wanted was to fade a stock tattoo, the free qb-tattooshop does that and V2 does not. No Gabz or MLO interior configuration ships in the box, where DeeP-Scripts includes one. The price cascade stops at the zone, so all six shops charge the same for the same tattoo, though in fairness no script in this comparison does per-shop pricing. Custom ink is budgeted rather than unlimited: 24 global custom slots and three simultaneously inked zones per player, both configurable, but finite by design, where a catalogue shop has nothing to run out of. And the freehand mode is a drawing tool, which means some of your players will produce something you would rather they had not, so the access gating and the admin studio are not optional extras on a public server.

If none of that applies and you only want the vanilla list done properly, Var-Tattoo is the smaller product: 693 tattoos across six zones with gender variants, individual per-tattoo pricing, a configurable remove-all using a price multiplier, cash or bank payment, six shop locations, and compatibility with esx_skin, qb-clothing, fivem-appearance and illenium-appearance. It is a better fit than V2 for a server that wants a tidy shop and nothing to moderate.

Whatever you install, test three things on a staging server before it goes live. Buy a tattoo, reconnect and check it is still there. Change clothes at a clothing store and check it survived the skin change. Then have a second player look at you. If you are choosing the rest of the appearance stack at the same time, the clothing store comparison and the character creator comparison cover the other two rooms, and the licensing trade behind every escrow row in the table above is unpacked in the escrow versus open source guide.

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