Glossary
AR Overlay
An AR overlay projects a tattoo design onto a live camera view of your skin.
An AR overlay is an augmented-reality technique that projects a tattoo design onto a live camera view of your skin in real time. Instead of placing art on a still photo, it uses your device's camera so the design appears to sit on your body as you move, follow the contour of your arm or leg, and update from different angles. This brings tattoo visualization closer to a real experience. As you rotate your wrist or shift your shoulder, the overlaid design moves with you, helping you judge how it flows over muscle, bends around a joint, or reads from different viewpoints. That sense of motion and perspective is hard to capture from a flat image and can reveal whether a placement truly works. AR overlay is the live, interactive cousin of virtual try-on, which uses a fixed photo; both aim to show a design on your actual body before any commitment. For someone weighing a tattoo, this helps answer practical questions about size, orientation, and placement while reducing the uncertainty that comes with imagining a permanent design. Platforms like wizard.tattoo use AR overlay within their visualization tools so a generated concept can be experienced on skin. It is a previewing aid rather than an exact rendering, but it makes planning far more tangible and intuitive.