Kaylee, 21, was visiting Seattle from Texas for the first time and celebrated by getting a paper airplane tattooed on her right hand. “Not only is this my first time to Seattle, it’s my first time on an airplane,” she said. No stranger to an inked needle, her other hand holds a palm tattoo with the word “Mom.” Eric Eye from Dark Age Tattoo was the artist on her 22nd tattoo.

CHS stopped by Witness for a good old-fashioned Old Fashioned and found Isaac Thummel behind the bar with his inked owl.

When asked whooo did it, Isaac told us it was by Ashley Waller (now in Chicago) at Super Genius Tattoo.

“Memento Mori is ‘remember death’, to me it’s remember you’re going to die, so live life while you can. In Celtic mythology Owls are the guides that take you to different spirit realms,” Isaac said.

Scotty Cayton, aka Betty Wetter, showed CHS a little skin at Saint Johns where they work both as a drag queen and bartender. Joined by owner Michael Lee (left), Betty (right) proudly displays their matching triceratops tattoo done by Emerald City Tattoo. Betty got the ink at last year’s holiday party as a party favor:

The entire staff has a wide variety of different ones. The main reason to get it to match the owner was for Mikey. He booked me for our first viewing party for Ru Paul’s Drag Race, one of the first things we hosted years ago. He’s gotten me my trivia night on Sunday night and has been a dear friend. Now I’m working with this family of people and this tattoo means that. It’s such a simple tattoo but it means so much. It’s also a dinosaur, how cute is that?!

We found Ingrid while in the sun at Plymouth Pillars Park at the base of Capitol Hill. Ingrid, an apprentice at Damask Tattoo, decided to show Ink her back piece that she “gave free rein to the artist” to create. This isn’t Ingrid’s first work by Honest John at Slave to the Needle in Ballard. “HJ is one of my good friends and I look up to him a lot as a tattooer,” Ingrid said, “so I wanted to give him a big area as somebody that I trust. That in itself means a lot to me that he would take on that big of a project and it is my favorite tattoo because I actually planned it out. It’s nice to have something that’s so large and pieced together.” Continue reading →

Rhea Reeves, a bartender at Cafe Pettirosso, showed us their badass lip tat. Inked in North Carolina, Rhea has no clue of the name of the person who did it. “It’s from the movie The Doom Generation,” she says, “where all the prices come out to $6.66. That’s why I got it.”

We met up with Kelly Verschueren, a University of Washington nursing student, near Seattle Central on Broadway. She chose to show us her “Keep Abortion Legal” tattoo that was done by Jeremy Decory at The Aorta Art Collective, above 11th Ave. Kelly says she chose the tattoo “in response to a breakup” while she was working at Planned Parenthood. “I had a boyfriend who asked if I could go a day without talking about abortion. I was like, ‘hmmm, no.’ Two weeks after we broke up, I got it, I’d been thinking about it anyway… It’s really important to me.” Kelly says the ink has brought positive response. “People maybe don’t want to fuck with someone who is ballsy enough to put the word abortion on their arm.”

Just outside of Kaladi Brothers on E Pike, we caught up with Elizabeth Moore Symmeson and Talia Antone who got friendship tattoos from Sara Purr at Rabid Hands in Ballard. With both working with women and children, the decision to get tattooed at a fundraiser donating money to a women’s domestic violence center was an easy one to make. After they got back from Standing Rock, they wanted to get tattoos of hands because Elizabeth slipped out of her zip-ties while on the bus to jail and helped to “scratch itches and move all the hair out of their face” of those who were still tied up. Continue reading →

Name: Chris
Location: E Pike
Artist: “My buddy Pete”

Chris Mead is the kitchen manager at Big Mario’s on Capitol Hill and we found him covered in tattoos on a rainy, cold Monday. His favorite tattoo is the green nasty fella from the comic book The Green Goblin’s Last Stand. The scene represents the front cover of the comic. “My buddy Pete was working at Super Genius (he doesn’t work there anymore, this was years ago) and I had him do it and he did it exactly from the page. It’s my favorite one. I think it looks amazing”.

Want to show off your ink on CHS? Let us know [email protected].