On a screen, Decoy Font can make one letter contain another. Thin outlines dominate at one viewing condition; step back or squint and a softer low-frequency shape becomes readable instead.
Mixfont built the experimental typeface from the same broad idea as hybrid images: combine visual information at different spatial frequencies so perception changes with distance. Creator Eric Lu presents it partly as a way to make text harder for AI and OCR systems to read, while explicitly warning that it is not reliable protection.
Tattoo artist Olivier Poinsignon is interested in a different problem. What survives when you replace pixels with skin?
The body ruins the laboratory conditions
Poinsignon’s August post is not a reveal of a finished Decoy Font tattoo. It documents simulations and an experiment he is still preparing.
That distinction matters because moving the idea onto a body immediately exposes assumptions that are easy to ignore on a screen.
Viewing distance is uncontrolled. An arm rotates. A thigh curves. Body volume creates shadows of its own. Fine contours need enough scale to remain useful after healing, while the softer layer still needs enough visual mass to emerge from farther away.
The same mark has to behave like two images on a surface that is neither flat, fixed nor perfectly repeatable.
Grey becomes part of the reading mechanism
Poinsignon already works with diluted greys and deliberately unstable readings. He describes using changes in value to control which forms remain visible at different distances. His previous tattoo work also includes ambigrams, intersecting words and compositions that change meaning with viewpoint.
Decoy Font extends that territory. Instead of one form gradually dissolving, the goal is for another reading to take its place.
Mixfont can generate and overlay those layers precisely in software. A tattoo artist has to decide what grey values can play the role of the soft low-frequency mass, how much detail the sharper outlines can carry, which part of the body interferes least with the effect and how large the entire piece needs to be.
Those are the questions Poinsignon says he wants to test on paper before putting the idea into skin.
A digital trick becomes a material problem
That translation is more interesting than the original “anti-AI” hook.
An optical system invented inside a browser has entered a craft where the substrate moves, heals and changes over time. A combination that is clean in a generated font can collapse when curvature, ink density and physical scale are introduced.
Poinsignon also describes trying to make AI image tools simulate the effect. In his tests, they reproduced something resembling the surface aesthetic rather than the actual two-reading mechanism, pushing him back toward manual experiments.
There is no finished answer yet, which is part of what makes this worth watching.
The useful story is not “a new tattoo style works.” It is a maker taking a property invented for one medium and discovering every assumption that breaks when it crosses into another.
Even if Decoy Font never becomes a dependable tattoo technique, the experiment reframes blur, scale, body shape and viewing distance as active design materials rather than constraints to hide.