The Glow Standard · Skincare · Tattoo Aftercare
A fresh piece is a wound dressed in pigment. Two formulas behave themselves on day three, when most of the cheap ones don’t.
The quick answer
Buy Dr Pickles Tattoo Balm at AU$24.95. It scored 8.7 on the Glow Standard, it is made on the Gold Coast, it is vegan, and it carries no petroleum jelly. On a fresh piece it feels lighter than the supermarket default and the colour settles cleaner. If the studio handed you a tube of Bepanthen and you trust the artist who put it there, you are fine — it scores 8.3, it is panthenol-based, it is widely tolerated, and it is the formula most Australian artists grew up with. It just feels heavier on the skin.
The ranking
Most tattoo aftercare on the shelf is either petroleum jelly with a logo or coconut oil with a story. These two are neither. Order is intentional; both are worth owning, especially if you are mid-sleeve.
Dr Pickles
Made on the Gold Coast, vegan, calendula-led, no petroleum. It melts in on contact rather than sitting on top, which is what you want once the plasma stage is done and the piece starts to flake. The colour settles cleaner than anything else we put on a fresh sleeve.
Buy from Dr Pickles
Bepanthen
The studio default. Panthenol-based, well-tolerated, no fragrance. It heals dependably and a lot of Australian artists have used it for thirty years. It also feels heavy and occlusive on the skin, and it is brighter on the texture of a fresh piece than the Dr Pickles is. If you like the feel of a thick barrier, this is yours.
Buy at Chemist WarehouseHow we tested
The rule: a balm earns a place here only if the artist who did the piece would put it on the next one. We trialled nine aftercare products across four fresh tattoos — a forearm script, a half-sleeve in progress, a single-needle wrist, and a saturated black-and-grey shoulder — through the full three weeks from cling-film off to the first proper moisturise.
Each piece used a single product start-to-finish so we could read the result honestly. We logged how the skin felt at day three (the hard day), how the scabs lifted, whether the colour stayed sharp or pulled, and what the surrounding skin looked like a fortnight later. We also asked each artist, separately, what they would actually hand a client.
Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Agresta led the read-out. Two formulas cleared the bar. The petroleum-jelly old guard and the coconut-oil internet wisdom both did not. We’d rather publish a short list that is honest than a long one that isn’t.
Field note
The cheap end of the tattoo aftercare shelf in Australia is mostly two things: tubs of generic paw paw repackaged with a needle motif, and petroleum jelly with a higher RRP. Neither is doing the piece any favours. The good Australian work is being done by Dr Pickles out of the Gold Coast — plant-based, vegan, calendula extract, no petroleum — and by the Bepanthen ointment that Bayer has been refining since long before tattooing went mainstream.
If you are about to sit for something large, the heuristic is straightforward: panthenol or calendula on the INCI, no fragrance, no petroleum jelly in the first three ingredients, and a feel light enough that the skin can still breathe. Coconut oil is comedogenic for a lot of people and a healing tattoo is the wrong place to find out. Ask the artist what they actually use on themselves. The answer is rarely whatever they sell at the front counter.
More: the cleanser ranking · the Ink Nurse review · every brand we trust.