HGG Community Forums

I've never used tattoos consistently (mostly because they cost money and I'm a tightwad and would rather just put tags in the name :P ) but a few things that are good for tracking with tattoos are things like generation, particular lines you have going, whether the horse is a rank special, or came from the foundation rescue, pasture foals that were the best of the bunch, and foals that comp test superior to parent. Anything that you can't search for easily with the existing search parameters and you don't want cluttering up the horse's name by using tags.

One tattoo I was thinking of making is a "fantasy" tattoo that I could use for my breeds that have both fantasy and non-fantasy lines in them. That way I could filter out fantasy horses or filter out non-fantasy horses without using the "hide fantasy/non-fantasy" parameters in the search, because when it just hides results instead of filtering them, I might have pages of completely hidden results I have to go through with only one or two horses showing on each page, instead of all of the results showing on one page. Things like that can be a good use of tattoos, because there really isn't an easy way to run particular horse searches otherwise.

I always make mine myself. I use GIMP which is really great for a free software. If you just need a simple tattoo, you can draw it yourself. There are some good guides on drawing pixel art that can help you make it look right as a small image. If you want something more complex, you can ask another player to create the image for you or you can take a clear image or photo of what you want and scale it down to 25x25 pixels. If you do that, play around with using interpolation or no interpolation because some images look better and clearer scaled with it and some without it. If you use any transparency in the image, be sure to save it as a PNG file because JPGs don't support transparency and any transparent pixels will be automatically filled with background color. I hope that helps. :)