A stroll through the Sapphire Palace ballroom, where the annual Inked Hearts Tattoo Expo has set up for more than 30 artists to display their work, as well as ink and pierce clients over three days, is a primer in body art aesthetics.
At one booth a grayscale tiger roars from a meaty quadricep, while at another across the aisle, a woman with what appears to be a charcoal sketch of a female nude on her upper arm sets up her table. Turn the corner around the black curtains dividing the space and find technicolor zebras, biceps bursting with flowers and pinup girls. At the end of one aisle, an artist freehands a macabre clown from a man’s shoulder to his elbow.
Nor Cal Tattoo, the hometown host of the expo, has a handful of stations for its stable of artists. You can’t miss Dre Meza in his red shirt and black bowler hat decorated with a single green feather, a sprinkling of piercings glinting from his temple and between his lip and copious, gray-striped beard.
Meza’s first client today is 19-year-old Kacee Michel of Ferndale, whose parents Meza has also tattooed. He shaves the back of Michel’s arm just at the edge of a curling dragon’s face and swipes it with alcohol. Instead of laying down a stencil, Meza makes swirls in pink Sharpie, loosely outlining where he’ll freehand shadows.
Michel says he started this, his first tattoo, a few months after turning 18, eager after seeing his parents’ work. “Every time they came home with a new piece, it just made me want to get something more.” Meza was a natural choice. “He’s been my mom’s artist probably since before I was born,” says Michel. His love of anime drew him toward something Japanese and the dragons in traditional irezumi tattoos and woodblock prints spoke to him. After talking it over with Meza, “I let him have total creative control over the whole thing. I just gave him the idea.”
They started with the dragon’s face, then the claw and the scaled body and background shading, the end of the tail and today’s shading of the body, with the work so far totaling 30 hours. Michel lies belly-down on the table, one arm extended, the other tucked beneath his chin.
“He approved everything but I’m very fortunate that he trusts me,” says Meza, who wields a cordless pen, a lighter instrument for a long day of work. He dips the needle in an ink pot the size of a toothpaste cap.
Michel blinks a little and works his bottom lip as the buzzing needle muffles against his skin. “The best way I can describe it is being stabbed by a pencil,” he says with a rueful smile.
Michel’s mother Sarah Dillon stops by and he tips his chin up, smiles and chats before saying, “I love you,” and returning to tapping on his phone.
“Dre has tattooed all [three of] my kids,” Dillion says, and Michel plans on a skull and flowers to match the floral pieces they all have. The feminine feel of flowers call to Dillon. Beyond that, she says, “I kind of just let Dre go with it.”
Every minute or so, Meza wipes Michel’s skin with witch hazel to soothe the skin. Single-needle stipple shading, he says, allows more subtlety than faster multi-pronged needles. “It’s just a slow build up to get where you want and it does the least amount of damage and heals really nice.” Swiping ointment from the heel of his glove to ease the needle’s entry, he continues, going by feel and checking results. The pressure and depth, Meza explains, determine whether the image lasts or bleeds “like a gray blob,” from going too deep, an error apparent in days.
As for pain, he says, “What might kill one person might be the easiest thing in the world for you,” says Meza. But generally, ribs, sternum and tops of feet are the most painful.
While Meza, whom readers voted Best Tattoo Artist in last year’s NCJ Best of Humboldt competition, uses a stripped-down house as a tattoo shop and a gallery for his paintings, he’s also been working at Nor Cal for two years. Having creative peers around to bounce ideas off, exchange critique and share encouragement is invaluable, as when a few of them decided to up their portraiture game. “They’re a great tattoo family,” he says. “I am a spoiled little brat. You won’t hear me complaining about shit.”
Monique Sutton and daughter Albee Alawoya, formerly of Mother’s Home Cooking Experience, are up from the Bay Area. They bonded with the Nor Cal crew when they were neighboring businesses in Northtown, and both Sutton and Alawoya have gotten pieces from the artists. Among them is Sutton’s bracelet with red, purple and pink gems representing the zodiac constellations for her and her mother, as well as a hovering bee for her daughter’s pet name. On her other wrist, she has a Cuban chain bracelet and Cuban flag that alludes to her heritage, a symbol all her siblings wear.
Some artists are hesitant to work on darker skin like hers, Sutton says, particularly with colors they’re afraid won’t pop as well as on pale tones. “But not here,” she says.
Maya Bennett, who’s tattooed Sutton and Alawoya, says working on different skin tones is about experience. She offers a color test — a couple dots to see how they settle after a month. She’s been tattooing for nine years, after finishing a two-year apprenticeship she started at 19 and one year tattooing with supervision. Before that, she was a teen drawing on her friends for fun.
The stigma against women tattoo artists has lessened, she says, but working elsewhere, she sometimes felt her work wasn’t respected as “real tattoo” and the boss treated treaded her like a “diversity hire.”
Standing beside her pink, heart-shaped table at her pastel-decorated station, Bennett, whose mother is Japanese, notes, “More feminine kawaii style has become more popular, but a few years ago it was like, ‘Why would anybody want that?’” She’s leaned into her style with her own flash book filled with ready-to-ink fairies, ladies with Japanese fox masks and dewy anime eyes. “I feel like this shop is really supportive of that.”
Alex Williams lies down on Bennett’s table for a flash fairy on the back of her arm. “I just love fairies, I always have,” she says. “I loved that the design looked kind of Asian because I’m Filipina, and I really love the flowers.”
“When I started tattooing,” says Meza, “there weren’t too many specialists in the game and if your style went out of style, you were stuck.” So, he says, he strives for versatility. Alongside the Asian and Mexican styles he favors are old-school sailor imagery and winking images of Muppets in cowboy hats. (A woman is due in for one of Beaker later; he can’t wait.)
But if someone comes in with a sketch of something downright ugly or an AI image with too many fingers, he’ll talk them through the issues and how they can be fixed. He also discourages younger people from face and neck tattoos before establishing themselves in their career, as well as names or portraits of romantic partners. Those, he’s convinced after seeing so many post-tattoo breakups, “are cursed.”
Reggae plays over the treble of buzzing tattoo guns from the floor. People stop at the table and flip through books of flash pieces and larger pencil drawings on a clipboard with full sleeves and other large pieces for inspiration.
Rae Robison and her husband John-Michael Wilkerson have come to the expo in search of an arm piece for him and a couple’s tattoo of a few bars of their song to go across their clasped hands. Music notes, unlike a name or a face, seem safe, right?
Wilkerson pushes up his sleeve to reveal where he had Robison’s name tattooed in runes.
“I broke up with him a month later,” she says, with a shaking laugh.
He shrugs and deadpans, “That’s why I got it in runes.” Besides, he notes, they got back together.
A woman comes over with an awkward name tattoo that needs fixing. Meza walks her over to Nor Cal artist Sonny Ghio, the newest artist in the shop at two years in. He’s finished apprenticeship, but the senior artists may send him, well, not exactly drudgery, but work to do for experience and problem solving, like fixing lettering.
Ghio shrugs. “That’s tattoo culture,” he says, smiling. “My mentors are good about not making me feel forced to take everything. It definitely makes me work in different styles,” making him stronger and more versatile.
Meza traces on a photo of a white long-haired Chihuahua to make a transferable stencil. It’s a somewhat old-school method but, he says, “It helps you focus and with a little muscle memory, it’s easier when you get in there.”
The first work he did was beyond bare bones. At 13, a friend’s terrifying swastika-emblazoned brother just out of prison grabbed Meza’s new Walkman and, after calling him a number of anti-Latino slurs, used the Walkman’s tiny motor to fashion himself a DIY tattoo gun with a guitar string needle. Once the brother left, Meza’s friends wanted to try it and since he was the only one who could draw, “under peer pressure” Meza used the jumpy gun to make a few scrawls on their skin that still haunt him.
It wasn’t until age 30, after a decade as a behavioral specialist, that he entered an apprenticeship while still working full time. After that, he moved on to another shop with his mentor as a reference.
Strictly speaking, apprenticeships aren’t required. There’s no test to certify a skilled tattoo artist in California. Adults who pass an online Cal OSHA Blood-borne Pathogen Training course, have a hepatitis B vaccination and a permit from the health department can legally work, though getting hired at a shop is tough without references and a portfolio. (Though portfolios can be stolen, as he says his was years ago.)
Without training, Meza complains, would-be artists learn from YouTube and the work suffers, as do the clients. Most of what’s on Post Malone’s face, for example, he calls “ignorant style,” lettering and designs that “look like little kids did it in a garage … like it was done by scratchers,” the lowest slang for terrible tattooists. The linework of a scratcher, he explains, is broken up and spotty, with inconsistent thickness and depth, badly healed with a shiny surface. Meza trained with thin synthetic skins atop his own, to learn proper depth, as well as constant drawing, watching and asking “old pros” questions.
“First, you have to become an incredibly clean person,” he says with a laugh. Then you learn set up, preparation and technique before bringing in your own creativity. He’s had one apprentice walk out after a week, eager to tattoo and unwilling to wait through training.
Sixty-seven-year-old Gayla Judd arrives for her first tattoo, the dog Meza was drawing earlier: Jojo Pumpkin Pie Judd, who died at 13 the day after Christmas. “I love my dog more than anything, well, maybe not my kids,” who called him their little brother, says Gayla Judd. She’s afraid of the pain, she says, and she trembles a little getting settled on the table, but she’s determined. “I want him to be with me, and when I go look at it, he’s with me forever.”
She nods to friend Connie Barrett and says, “I’m so scared,” with a shaky little smile. Asked if the drawn image looks like Jojo, Judd looks at the indigo transfer image and nods, her eyes wet.
After a few minutes, Judd is breathing more evenly as she watches Jojo’s face emerging in soft gray ink, eyes dark and round. She looks at her arm and smiles. “He’s beautiful.”
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106 or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky and Instagram @JFumikoCahill.
This article appears in Needles and Ink.