Free, no login. Works with illenium, fivem-appearance, xnTattoos and rcore.

FiveM Tattoo Maker

Turn a PNG into a tattoo or MC patch, place it on the male and female freemode ped with a live 3D preview, and download a resource that your appearance script loads as-is.

Textures match the game's own tattoo files byte for byte. Placement uses the game's coordinates, so the preview is what you get in the server.

Open the free studio How it works

What the export contains

One texture dictionary per tattoo, DXT5, full mip chain, verified against Rockstar files
Overlay XML with a male and a female entry per design
shop_tattoo.meta with zone, facing and update group from the game's presets
names.lua with display names, config snippets for four appearance scripts
fxmanifest.lua with the right data_file lines, README with install steps

Three steps, no CodeWalker

No OpenIV, no DDS converter, no guessing coordinates in an XML file.

Upload a design or write one

PNG with transparency works best. The studio squares it, caps it at 1024 px and lets you add text in the game's own display fonts for club names and rockers.

rose.png · 1024 × 1024 · transparent

or type: SONS OF LOS SANTOS

Place it on the ped

Choose the zone and a spot preset taken from the game's own tattoo shop positions (chest, back, sleeves, hands, face), then drag on the 3D ped or fine-tune with sliders. Male and female get their own placement from one image.

ZONE_TORSO · Chest full

uvPos 0.727 / 0.605 · scale 0.17 · rotation 0

female: 0.740 / 0.640 · 0.125 × 0.165

Download and install

The ZIP unpacks into a resource: overlay XML, one texture per tattoo, shop_tattoo.meta, names.lua and config snippets for four appearance scripts. Add it to server.cfg after the script that loads it.

sw_yourname_overlays/

sw_yourname_overlays.xml

stream/…_rose_chest.ytd

exports/illenium.lua · fivem-appearance.json · xntattoos.json · rcore.json

Built on the game's own tattoo files

We took the tattoo system apart before building the studio: 38 vanilla collections with 3,372 overlays, the decal UV layouts of both freemode peds, and the texture format of every Rockstar tattoo file.

Placement from real presets

Chest, back, sleeves, hands, legs and face positions come from the median of the game's tattoo shop groups, per gender.

Textures byte for byte

DXT5, full mip chain, DIFFUSE usage and the size-dependent usage flags of vanilla tattoo dictionaries. The rcore generator ships one mip level; we ship eight.

Two placements, one image

Only 174 of the 1,476 vanilla male/female pairs share a position. The studio keeps a placement per ped and previews each on its own body.

FiveM Tattoo Maker FAQ

The ZIP contains ready config snippets for illenium-appearance, fivem-appearance (and the wasabi fork), xnTattoos and rcore_tattoos, plus a shop_tattoo.meta for menus that read the vanilla tattoo shop list. Every entry carries the male and female overlay names and the collection.

Yes, from one image. The male and female freemode bodies use different decal layouts, so the studio keeps two placements. They start linked; unlink them to fine-tune each ped on its own. The game itself stores tattoos this way, one overlay per gender.

Both are ped decorations. A tattoo (TYPE_TATTOO) draws on the skin, under clothing. A patch (TYPE_BADGE) draws on the torso clothing layer, which is how the game does crew emblems and t-shirt prints. Pick "Patch" for MC logos that should sit on a shirt or vest.

The usual causes: the resource is not in server.cfg, the overlay XML is missing from files{} in fxmanifest.lua, the script config uses a different collection name, or you applied the male overlay to a female ped. The export avoids all four: it ships the manifest, names everything consistently and prints the exact collection and overlay names into the configs.

A PNG with a transparent background, square if possible, up to 1024 px. JPG and WebP work too; the studio pads them to a square. Dark ink on transparency reads best on skin. Colour tattoos are fine.

Yes. Each tattoo becomes its own texture dictionary in the same format the game uses (DXT5 with a full mip chain and the same usage flags), which we verified byte by byte against Rockstar tattoo files.

The design is uploaded only to build the resource and is deleted with the job data. Nothing is published or shared.

Make your first tattoo now

Drop a PNG into the studio, place it on the ped and download the resource. Free, no login, one tattoo per free pack.

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