OUR STORY

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How do you tell a story like the evolution of tattooing in Canada? 

It’s a multi-layered, overlapping timeline of pioneering efforts by outsider artists at a time when society deemed the craft repulsive, criminal, and deviant.  It’s an elaborate black hole of first hand stories and tall tales embellished by time and crusty raconteurs. 

And as surely as they were pioneers they were birthed into a dark craft practiced by their mentors  and hero’s, men with mysterious and wildlife stories mostly lost to time. Like pirates, their legacy is fabled. 

Who were these titans on the vanguard, pushing a sailors folk art to become a custom craft that we take for granted today?  Long before the instafamous tattoo influencer , decades before the explosion of tattoo tv and globally recognized tattoo artists there were a few dedicated practitioners living on the fringe, bringing their creativity to an ancient medium, and exploring its possibilities.