If your tattoo was designed by AI, does it have a soul?

He hadn’t actually drawn from scratch the gothic sword she requested before permanently putting it on her left shin. Instead, he used artificial intelligence to design it.

“He was kind of proud," says Vuorinen, a 30-year-old dental nurse in Helsinki. “I was like, in shock. I was so disappointed."

She let the artist finish the job, which he told her included some personal touches, since at that point the tattoo was nearly finished. “It’s pretty, but it doesn’t have a soul," she says.

The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini has given people an easier and faster way to handle all sorts of tasks, from writing speeches and making songs to producing videos and creating logos. Users simply type out prompts describing what they want and seconds later the programs return results made from large language models trained on massive amounts of online data.

Yet for some body-art enthusiasts, AI-designed tattoos are taboo. They argue that a true tattoo artist doesn’t just put ink on people’s skin but is also responsible for drawing the images by hand, from start to finish. They also worry that AI image generators are built off professional artists’ work without permission.

“You’re essentially cheating," says Matt Doherty, a 41-year-old tattoo artist in Sicklerville, N.J. “It’s like doing sports on steroids."

Using AI to design a tattoo also can produce bizarre results, warns Doherty, such as images of hands with extra digits or bodies with missing limbs.

Another potential hiccup is that some AI-generated images just don’t translate well into tattoos, says Matthew Hatch, who is the first point of contact for prospective clients at a studio in Toronto. Someone recently inquired about getting a tattoo for the first time of an AI-made image of galaxies in outer space. Hatch, 27, told the person that it would end up looking like a giant bruise. “There are limitations on what is possible," he says.

Others say AI-designed tattoos are high in quality and fair game since the programs produce fully original images, even when the same prompt is repeated. Besides, artists still need technical skills to put ink onto clients’ bodies.

“It just outperforms people," says Ziggy Tramdaks, a 30-year-old tattoo artist in Derby, England, of generative AI. He sees the technology as the future of tattoo design. “AI will take over this industry whether we want it to or not," he says. “You can swim against the river or learn."

Robert Deans, one of Tramdaks’s clients, designed the four mythological Greek characters that cover his entire left arm by using Tattoo GPT, a custom-made version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s something he couldn’t do by hand because when it comes to drawing, “I’m rubbish," he says.

Deans, a 46-year-old marketing executive in Nottingham, England, spent several hours fine-tuning prompts he wrote to get each character exactly how he wanted. Tramdaks started on the project a few months ago and it’s almost finished. Deans describes his AI-designed “sleeve" as one-of-a-kind thanks to the technology. “People are genuinely gobsmacked by the detail and how realistic it looks," he says.

Technology-related rifts aren’t new within the profession. Decades ago, some artists were resistant to the rising popularity of motorized, rotary-style tattoo machines and instead continued to rely on coil machines powered by electromagnetic forces, according to Ben Shaw, a director at the Alliance of Professional Tattooists, a nonprofit. “They were loyal to the coil," he says.

More recently, debates have broken out over whether it’s kosher to use tablets, digital pens and graphics software. “The iPad drove so many tattoo artists bonkers," Shaw says. “It was like: How dare you not draw on a sacred piece of paper?"

Shaw, 44, owner of Archetype Tattoo in Albuquerque, N.M., likens such technological upgrades to how an electric drill can be more handy than a screwdriver. Lately he’s been using generative AI to save time figuring out what kind of tattoos his clients want, which can be hard for some to articulate, before creating a final version by hand. “I’ve spent up to 20 hours on a design, shown it to the client and they hated it," he said. “AI is changing the way tattoos are being designed."

Distinguishing between artwork that’s made by a human versus an AI tool can be difficult. When a client asked Josie Davis for an arm tattoo of a drawing of an eye with petal-like tears, she asked the woman if she’d gotten permission to copy the image from the artist who created it. The client said she didn’t need to because it was AI-generated.

Davis, owner of Sparrow’s Nest Tattoo Studio in Grand Rapids, Mich., was thrown for a loop. “I had an internal conflict on what to do about this," she says. “I still draw with pen and paper all the time."

Ultimately Davis, 38, decided to take the job, reasoning it’s the client’s body and there were no apparent copyright issues.

A few months ago, Francesco Chiaramonte, a master’s degree student in Carcavelos, Portugal, launched an AI tattoo generator he built after first considering making an AI hairstyle generator. Called Ink Studio AI, he charges $14.99 for seven days of access to it and to date he says he’s netted about 60 customers.

A native of Italy, Chiaramonte, 21, put a post on Reddit in a tattoo community promoting the tool when it went live, but commenters mostly gave him grief. “AI is theft," wrote one person. “This is so sad," wrote another. Chiaramonte says he’s unphased. “It’s good for the customer," he says.

Chiaramonte has just one tattoo—of a series of overlapping triangles on his right arm that symbolizes a loved one who died. He got it before starting his AI business. “I’m not super into getting tattoos, at least for now," he says.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at Sarah.Needleman@wsj.com