Tommy Montoya has witnessed in first-person the underground and the mainstream of the tattoo scene. Recognized for his persistent 20 years of West-coast black-and-gray tattooing, Montoya, a California-based artist rose to global fame for starring in television shows like “NY Ink” (2011 – 2013). In 2019, Tommy Montoya and Ryan Ashley Malarkey headlined the “Feather […]
Tag: United States
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 […]
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, […]
Resulting in one of our favorite expos in the Bay Area so far, Santa Rosa & Blues is one of the longest running tattoo shows in the United States. Located at the historical Flamingo resort that formerly accommodated Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield in the 1960s. The event’s new ownership (since 2017) by long-time friends Daniel […]
Although not a lot of people knew where Oroville was (a pleasant town north of Sacramento in California), many tattoo enthusiasts made their way there to see the Feather Falls (Casino) Tattoo Expo, organized by Chris Earl who also held the Fresno event a week ago. Celebrities like Tommy Montoya, Ryan Ashley Malarkey and BABA […]
