Mary Poppinks
A trilingual site for a fine-line tattoo artist: an archive you drag through and an enquiry that ends up in her WhatsApp, with nothing to renew.
The number
20
works, each with a name, in one draggable archive
Maria Egger tattoos fine-line and botanical work in St. Pauls bei Eppan. The name is a joke that stuck — Mary Poppins plus ink. Everything the brand needed already existed: a gold bull-skull mark drawn with lilies and a sunflower, years of work photographed, two Instagram accounts, four South Tyrolean outlets writing about her.
01 · The brief
A padlock where the work should have been.
The website was the part that didn't. marystattoostick.com had been a shop in password mode since mid-2024 — a free default theme behind the line "Der Shop ist zur Zeit Offline". Anyone who searched for her by name landed on a padlock.
The real brief was underneath that. A site is a thing you have to run, and she had already had one die of exactly that. So the build had to be worth looking at and cost her nothing to keep alive: no CMS, no dashboard, no subscription to a tool she would never open twice.
02 · The archive
Twenty pieces, each with a name.
The archive is not a wall of thumbnails. Each of the twenty pieces carries the name she uses for it — Löwenmut, Memento Mori, Bergliebe, Dolchrose — and a named piece reads as a work instead of a sample. Eight of them surface on the homepage as stacking cards; all twenty live on their own page behind a strip index you can jump from or drag past.
Drag is the primary verb here, so the scroll had to stay honest. The smoothing runs on desktop only and touch keeps the browser's own scrolling; nothing on the site is hover-only, because on a phone a hover state is simply a feature that does not exist.
04 · The enquiry
A form that behaves like a message.
Her books open twice a year, on a fixed date at a fixed hour — the next window is 6 September 2026 at 10:00. Between windows an ordinary contact form is worse than nothing: it collects hope and answers none of it.
So the form fills in early and then waits. What you type is held on your own device under a single key, not on a server — the page has no action, no request, no endpoint of any kind. A countdown runs to the opening. At ten o'clock one tap turns the finished answers into a WhatsApp message in her inbox, which is the channel she already runs her day on.
05 · The build
How it ships.
390 pixels was the design surface and the desktop is the adaptation, not the other way round. Everything below is the live site: the homepage sequence, the phone views it was drawn at, one of the twenty works, the DJ page, and the press wall.
What I built
01No CMS, deliberately
The only thing that changes is the work, and it reaches me directly. The site is static HTML in a repo where a push to main deploys — nothing to log into, nothing to renew, nothing that can quietly break while she is tattooing.
02Two golds, not one
The logo gold #C19E57 is beautiful on ink and illegible as small type on cream. Gold text on the light ground is therefore a second, darker value, #8A6B2C; the logo gold is kept for surfaces, seals and rules.
03The form the brief had banned
The direction lock banned intake forms outright — the reference site's long questionnaire is exactly what makes an anxious first-tattoo client close the tab. What shipped is three short steps that post nowhere and end as a WhatsApp message. The ban held; the friction stayed out.
04Three languages, three documents
German, Italian and English are separate URLs with real hreflang and an x-default, not a client-side toggle. The Italian page says Appiano and Alto Adige, because that is what her Italian clients call the place.
Next project
Let's talk
Got a project in mind? Send me two lines — I answer myself, the same day.
Let's talk. I answer personally.