My friend made an appointment here after looking at the yelp page and the facebook page. From reading the pages it sounds like the owner is cool and passionate and it says in its own description that... Read More
My friend made an appointment here after looking at the yelp page and the facebook page. From reading the pages it sounds like the owner is cool and passionate and it says in its own description that the shop welcomes custom tats in "ANY" style. This appealed to my friend since she had a pencil sketch she wanted copied as it was in the artist's hand, not a traditional tattoo style. If you are reading this and are after something similar, I cannot speak for the other artists there but do not book with Staci. The minute we walked in he made us feel like we were ruining his day by being there. If it had been me getting the tattoo, I would have left right away just from the bad vibes. But my friend showed the sketch to Staci and he started in about how he pretty much couldn't achieve the level of detail. I have 5 tattoos and my friend has, i don't know a million she's gotten over the past 10 years, so we've met many artists, know what works and what doesn't as far as execution, and most importantly know what we ourselves prefer in our designs. I'm also aware that tattoo artists come with their own brand of loveable elitist attitude, but this guy was really somethin else that I've never experienced going into a shop before. He took the sketch, went in the back for a long time where we could hear him cursing to his coworker, and came out with his tracing for the stencil -- I think my jaw dropped it was so poorly drawn. At this point, I became suspicious that this "award winning, internationally recognized" artist was deliberately trying to chase us out of the shop. He blamed it of course on not being able to achieve that level of detail, but this line drawing did not even match the basic outline of what he had directly traced! There was a little flower in the sketch that he didn't even try to do and just turned into a clunkily drawn blade of grass. It looked like he spent about 8 seconds on the whole thing. I looked at my friend and she was near tears (this sketch was a drawing of a dear pet she had lost earlier in the week). At this point I finally said let's just get out of here! We ended up going to a shop down the street where the artist looked at the sketch, warned about the level of detail, but said he'll do his best (all we ask). And guess what, he's even putting in the little flower that Staci just couldn't/wouldn't handle. I hate to make Tiny Tim's only review a bad one, but I feel like people deserve the warning that my friend didn't get here on yelp before going. Read Less