Tag: United States

Dearly Departed Tattoos: An Interview with Mark Clifford

Mark Clifford spent most of his life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was born in 1975. He held various jobs and played in a band, which led him and his bandmates to get tattoos and ignited his interest in this art form. Clifford started working as a tattooer in 2001 and co-owned a tattoo shop […]

Madame Chinchilla and Mr G: Triangle Tattoo & Museum

Tattoo enthusiasts must visit Triangle Tattoo & Museum in Fort Bragg on the Mendocino County coast of California. Madame Chinchilla and Mr G, tattoo artists, industry historians, and life partners, founded this space in 1986. Both had trained under Bert Rodriguez, a Mexican-American tattoo artist who started a Santa Rosa studio in 1978 and the Tattoos & […]

The 5th Seaside Tattoo Show at Ventura County Fairgrounds

The first-ever Ventura County Fair was held in 1874 at the conclusion of the local San Miguel Days agricultural festival; 149 years later, Christina Diaz organized the 5th Seaside Tattoo Show at the Fairgrounds in a Quonset hut named San Miguel. The Pacific Ocean is so close to this venue that it can be heard […]

Art Show by Seventh Son Tattoo at 111 Minna Gallery

Even though 2022 was the official “Year of the Tiger,” Seventh Son Tattoo believed it would be a fitting homage to begin 2023 with a traditional motif as the theme for their art exhibition. From Pinky Yun to Ed Hardy, the tiger has been consistently and strongly represented in the tattoo industry. Luke Stewart, tattooist […]

Upcoming Book Release: Tattoo Master Pinky Yun

Scorpion Front Publishing will print “Tattoo Master Pinky Yun: The Don Ed Hardy Flash Collection” by author and American-Japanese tattooist Takahiro Kitamura in March 2023. The life and work of Pinky Yun, born in Canton, China, on October 29, 1927, are shown on 111 pages in a 90s-style graphic arrangement. Yun moved to Hong Kong […]

Outer Limits: The United States’ Oldest Tattoo Shop

Kari Barba (1960–) is a distinguished, award-winning tattoo artist with more than four decades of expertise in the industry. She is a co-owner of Outer Limits Tattoo & Museum, the oldest continually functioning tattoo studio in the United States and the second-oldest in the world. This establishment was founded in 1927 by an unidentified person […]

Interview with Celebrated Tattooer Tommy Montoya

Tommy Montoya has seen firsthand both the underground and the mainstream of the tattoo scene. Recognized for his 20-year commitment to West Coast black-and-gray tattooing, Montoya, a California-based artist, rose to international prominence after appearing on the television show “NY Ink” (2011–2013). Tommy Montoya and Ryan Ashley Malarkey headlined the 2019 “Feather Falls Tattoo Expo” […]

TTTism Presents the 15th Annual Bay Area Tattoo Convention

The highly awaited Bay Area Tattoo Convention (presented by TTTism) was held on the weekend of May 16 to 18 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Burlingame, three-minutes away from the San Francisco airport. Many tattooists in the Bay Area were ecstatic to be attending and  bragging about it in their studios because of how […]

Nikko Hurtado: Work Smart and Be Grateful

We met up with tattooist Nikko Hurtado at the end of a warm-winter day at the conference hall, a building located across the Golden State Tattoo Expo in Pasadena, where he and other prominent colleagues Joe Capobianco and BJ Betts conducted workshops to aspiring artists. Hurtado, the event co-host and studio owner of Black Anchor, […]