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slawrie@thekmgroup.co.uk
The Maidstone Tattoo Extravaganza celebrated the weird and wonderful world of body modification at the weekend.
Thousands of tattoo artists and enthusiasts descended on the Kent Showground at Detling to share their passion for body art.
“It’s about 1,000 people a day that turn up,” says festival organiser Fraser Williams who arrived 6am Thursday and stayed until late Monday night. “I sleep onsite on a camp bed. But then the public turns up at 9am and goes ‘wow’, and that’s the best bit.”
The convention began in 2017 when Fraser and his wife Sam, who owned their own tattoo studio in
Maidstone until the pandemic forced them to shut up shop, got tired of travelling to exhibitions away from home.
“[Sam] used to go to tattoo conventions and she said, ‘How hard do you think it’ll be to do one?’ and I said, ‘I don’t think it’ll be that hard’ stupidly!” laughs the 49-yearold.
“We thought, Maidstone’s a massive town and there’s a massive Kent Event Centre at the top there so let’s have a go at it. And it worked. It went really well, we raised a bit of money for charity, all the artists were happy and so we said we’d do another one, and we just kept doing it every year.”
While this year is the smallest festival so far previous years have seen almost 150 artists set up booths over the weekend while this year was just short of 80 - that hasn’t put off the convention’s regular tattooists.
“I’ve supported the show since it first started,” says Alex Crook, who has his own tattoo studio in Sittingbourne. “I’m one of the most booked up artists in the area with normally around a year waiting list, so I’ve always supported them.”
Alex, who specialises in realism and portrait tattoos, sees the convention as an opportunity to showcase his work and drum up word-ofmouth buzz.
“I did a pin-up girl, like a Gil Elvgren portrait of a pin-up girl on the bonnet of a car about three or four years ago now, and there was a point when I looked around and
there were about probably 20 or 30 people standing there,” recalls Alex. “Everyone’s very supportive of one another.”
The exhibition has been absent for the past two years, but made its return over the Easter bank holiday- despite plenty of financial struggles for Fraser and Sam who lost £4,500 when their company went bankrupt.”
Despite being out of pocket this year, the organisers are determined to keep the convention an independent affair.
“We have no sponsorship, it’s completely independent which is a big deal for us. We don’t do it for profit. Demelza House gets donations, the Royal British Legion has a stand for free and they raise money, the fire brigade were there two years ago and they got £1,000 in donations. We try to help local businesses, basically, which is what it’s about.”
Alex’s career has been full of high-pressure designs.
“If a parent is unfortunate enough to lose a kid, and you have to do the kid’s portrait on a forearm, there’s no higher pressure,” says the 38-year-old. “I also tattooed nipple tattoos for breast cancer victims in 2019. I found out someone was quoted £600 for two nipples and I thought, that’s awful. These people were purely profiteering off of someone’s misfortune. So I said, ‘I’m doing it for free for the rest of the year’ and that post went viral.
“We set a cap of one a week for the rest of the year, and I did over 100 in that time.
On a weekly basis, that was transformational.”