Tattoo Artist Collaborates with Robot, Impossible to Tell Difference

Robots are taking more jobs traditionally performed by humans ... and artists better watch their backs too ... 'cause machines can ink about as well as flesh-and-blood tattoo artists.

Dillon Forte -- a Texas-based tattoo artist with some serious celebrity clients -- worked on a new tat alongside Blackdot ... a tech startup that created the world's first automated tattoo machine.

You gotta watch this robot at work ... the client gets their arm strapped down to a table while a giant machine goes to work on the limb, using fast-working mechanisms to tattoo.

Forte and Blackdot each took on their fair share of the work for the project ... cutting responsibility straight down the middle, 50-50, and making a design inspired by NASA and the sci-fi book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Check out the pics ... a series of symbols chockful of space references, with many images appearing on NASA's Voyager Golden Record sent up in 1977 to give possible life a look at our world. It's super hard to tell the part inked by Forte versus Blackdot's portion.

We're told Blackdot tattooed the middle portion of the ink, while Forte went around it ... adding his own personal flair to the top and bottom. The difference is super slight -- definitely makin' ya think about the future for tattoo artists.

Forte's a pretty big name in the tattoo world BTW ... he's inked huge celebs like Usher, Kat Von D, and Chris Hemsworth -- though we'd go out on a limb and say this might've been his strangest tattooing experience yet.