Ghostline vs Procreate for tattoo stencils

These two get compared constantly, and it is the wrong comparison — one converts a photo into a stencil, the other is a drawing app. Here is what each actually does, and which one your week needs.

Written by the Stencil AI team — we make a third tool in this category, covered once near the end and labelled as ours. Every figure below comes from the two apps' own App Store listings, verified 2026-09-25.

The short answer

• Ghostline is the one built for stencils. You give it a reference photo, it gives you a stencil in seconds, and it prints at true size. $5.99 a month, iPhone and iPad only.
• Procreate is not a stencil tool and has never claimed to be — its listing does not mention stencils. It is the best drawing app on an iPad, $12.99 once, and it can be coaxed into producing a stencil with Curves and Threshold.
• If you convert client photos, you want a converter. If you design pieces yourself, you want Procreate. Plenty of artists need both, and that is a normal answer rather than a cop-out.

What each one actually is

Ghostline

A dedicated tattoo stencil app, on the App Store since 2023. You feed it a reference, pick from classic, pro, outline, denoised, and it returns a stencil. It includes pen, eraser, ruler for cleanup, print scaling so the stencil comes out at the size you intend, and a reference viewer for the session. It runs on iphone and ipad only, needs iOS 17.6 or later, and offers a 7 days free trial before $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year.

Procreate

A full illustration application, $12.99 as a one-time purchase, ipad only (procreate pocket, $5.99, is a separate iphone app), requiring iPadOS 16.3 or later. Brushes, layers, masks, animation — everything you need to draw a tattoo design from nothing. It has no stencil feature. Artists produce stencils in it by opening Adjustments, pushing contrast with Curves, then dragging the Threshold slider until the image collapses to black and white, then erasing what is wrong by hand.

How the stencils compare

On bold line art, lettering or a clean silhouette, both routes work. The reference is already high-contrast, so a single cutoff is all anyone needs, and Procreate's Threshold will match a dedicated app closely enough that the difference does not reach the skin.

On a photograph they diverge, and the reason is worth understanding because it applies to every threshold-based method. Threshold asks one question of each pixel — brighter or darker than this number? — with no idea what the pixel belongs to. A cheekbone, a strand of hair and a dark background are all just values. So the shadow side of a face turns into one solid black mass, hair becomes a silhouette, and the mid-tones that carry a portrait simply vanish. No amount of Curves work beforehand fixes it, because the problem is not the contrast curve; it is that the tool has no notion of structure.

Ghostline is doing something more than a plain threshold pass, and offers four modes aimed at different reference types. It does not publish what happens internally and we are not going to speculate about it. Run your own hardest reference through any candidate and look at the eyes, the fur direction, and the edge where light meets shadow.

What each really costs

Procreate is cheaper over any long horizon — $12.99 once against $59.99 a year — and the gap widens every year you keep working. But the comparison only means something if both tools do the job you need. Paying $12.99 for a drawing app because it is cheaper than a converter is a false economy if what you actually needed was a converter; you pay the difference back in time, at whatever your hourly rate is, every time a client photo arrives.

The honest way to run the numbers: estimate how many references you convert in a month and how long each takes you by hand. Two hours a month of manual tracing is worth more than either app costs.

Who each one is for

• Pick Ghostline if most of your work starts from a photo the client sent, you are on an iPhone or iPad, and you want the conversion to take seconds rather than an evening.
• Pick Procreate if you design your own pieces, you want to own the tool outright rather than rent it, and converting photographs is an occasional job rather than the weekly bottleneck.
• Get both if you do custom work: convert the reference in one, then draw on top of it in the other. This is the most common setup among artists who do both.
• Neither, if you are on Android — both are Apple-only, so this whole comparison is moot and you need a tool that runs where you work.

The third option, and the one we make

Full disclosure: Stencil AI is ours. It is a stencil converter like Ghostline rather than a drawing app, so it competes with Ghostline and not with Procreate. We are putting it here because the section above ends with a real gap — neither of those two tools reads a photograph properly, and one of them does not run where half of you work.

What it does differently. Stencil AI understands the photograph before it converts it. It works out what is a face and what is background, which way the light is falling, and which edges are structure rather than noise. That changes the output in four ways you can see on the printed sheet:

• Structural outlines come out clean, confident and closed — the contours you actually line with, not the broken fragments a contrast cutoff leaves behind.
• Shadows are preserved, not deleted. Stencil AI's Hatching style renders the tonal map as cross-hatching dense enough to survive printing and transfer, so the shading is planned on the stencil instead of improvised on skin.
• Fine detail is still there at print resolution — individual hair direction, iris texture, the break between planes on a cheekbone, the fur pattern on an animal. This is the detail Threshold destroys first and never recovers.
• You choose how it converts. Outline, Standard, Hatching are separate styles, not one filter with a slider: Outline for clean linework, Standard for a full tattoo-ready stencil, Hatching when the piece is the shadow — portraits, black-and-grey, realism.

And what happens after the conversion, which is where a converter usually stops. Stencil AI includes a retouch editor with brushes, tap-to-remove fills and tone curves; true-to-size printing measured from the ink rather than the page; multi-stencil sheets with each piece at its own size; warping a stencil to follow a shoulder, calf or ribcage before you print it; LiDAR measurement directly on skin on supported iPhones; a Tattoo Mode reference viewer for the session; and a library of 1,000+ ready-made subjects for when a client arrives with nothing. It runs on iPhone, iPad, Android and web from one account, in 16 languages — so it is the only one of the three that exists at all if you work on Android or in a browser.

It is used by 5,000+ paying tattoo artists who have generated over 194,000 stencils, and it holds 4.6 stars from 187 App Store ratings. It is built by working tattoo artists — a co-founder who tattoos full time, and an award-winning artist and convention judge with three decades behind the machine who sets the quality bar every stencil is measured against.

The honest costs. It is the most expensive of the three at $13.99 a month, and it has no free trial where Ghostline gives you 7 days — you get a free preview of your stencil before paying instead. It will not draw a design from scratch; that is Procreate's job and Procreate is better at it than anything else. And if your references are bold line art or lettering, all three tools will do fine and you should buy on price. The case for Stencil AI is specifically the hard reference: the portrait, the fur, the black-and-grey piece where everything depends on what survives the conversion. Put your worst one through it and look at the eyes. The full Stencil AI vs Ghostline comparison says where Ghostline wins, too.

All three, side by side

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