TATTOOING FOR THE PURISTS
Top artists in a variety of styles gather in Burlingame for annual convention
BURLINGAME — After a subdued Sunday morning — tattoo artists are prone to partying pretty hard on Saturday nights — the convention center at the Hyatt Regency was buzzing like a beehive by 1 p.m. as electric-powered stingers left swaths of indelible color across tender canvas.
Longtime San Jose tattoo artist Taki Kitamura said his Bay Area Tattoo Convention, now in its 13th year, gets down to business like that — it’s more of a place for purists, less a gallery for gawkers.
“We don’t have piercers here, we don’t have pin-up model contests, we don’t have bands,” he said. “You’ll see that at other tattoo conventions, especially in L.A., and tattooing itself becomes sort of a side attraction. This isn’t like that — you want to see strippers, go to a strip club. You wan’t to see a band? Go to a music venue.”
The amiable and chatty Kitamura, 43, said his convention is an invite-only affair for top artists in a variety of styles. Amid the 96 booths, styles varied from traditional Americana and popular Japanese designs to ghoulishly dark pieces reminiscent of an H.R. Giger painting and Samoan tribal hand-tapped bands that can blacken most of a fellow’s real estate from waist to knees.
Convention organizers have been called snobs because they set the bar of quality so high, but Kitamura emphasized they
don’t look down on their brothers and sisters in ink with less-evolved adornments — though an ankle butterfly may not be as interesting a talking point as a back piece that reveals a life story.
“It all has a place, and there is a universal appeal to tattoos that crosses cultures, and we’re not here to say what’s a real tattoo or what’s not a real tattoo,” said Kitamura, adding that the important thing is pleasing the client.
The appeal of tattoos has exploded since Kitamura got his first studio work done — a tribal thing on the side of his head — before he turned 18.
“When I was growing up, you’d go to that one biker guy in town, and you’d get what you get,” said the San Jose native. “And if you saw someone with a tattoo, you knew you were in the same group as them.”
Kitamura added that people who used to look down on him for having tattoos — “frat guys, jocks and cops” — now make up a huge portion of studio customers. And while there’s a loss of some of that fringe camaraderie, most long-timers don’t grouse.
“Everybody is getting them,” said New York City-based artist Jon Clue. “Even the people who used to point fingers at us and call us scumbags, now they all want to have tattoos, too. It is what it is.”
Alexandra Fische, a 27year old tattoo artist and model from Philadelphia, said that’s fine with her.
“It’s good that some of these stereotypes are being broken,” she said. “It’s definitely good for business.”
Times have changed in other ways. The art itself is quick to get around, and a unique piece is rapidly copied. And the sheer number of artists out there means successful artists must adapt.
“The art hasn’t stopped evolving,” said Juan Puente, who has been in the business for 27 years. “To be a tattoo artist now, you have to be so much better than when I started out — you have to be a completely different level.”
And, still, sometimes he’ll see something that will “dazzle,” Puente said.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I thought I’d seen everything, but sometimes you’ll see something you’d never seen before,” he said. “That’s the dazzle.”
There is one thing that remains, and that’s the rite of passage — the unavoidable pain of having the needles drilling into increasingly sensitive parts, sometimes for hours on end.
Marshall Schraeder, of Redding, was getting inked for the third straight day — he’d just done nine hours under the hand of San Franciscobased Kevin Marr on Saturday and was having part of a bright Japanese design etched on his thigh on Sunday.
“I’ve always wanted a body suit,” he said, showing the 12 months of work that had already gone subdermal.
Marr joked that the pain is worst from “hour zero.” Schraeder said he knew he’d had enough Saturday when he started feeling queasy. But that didn’t stop him from coming back.
“You just gotta buck up,” he said.