Inking West Ashley

CHARLESTON - Not long ago the businesses run by Dave Marcotte, Jason Eisenberg and Glenn Collins would have been illegal in Charleston.

But when South Carolina's legislature lifted the state's ban on tattooing in May 2004 it opened the door to one of the oldest art forms in human existence.

Marcotte has been operating tattoo studios in West Ashley the longest, first opening his old shop Lucky 7s on Belgrade Avenue back in 2006. More than a year ago he moved to a new location at 1921 Savannah Highway and opened a new shop called Iron Lotus Studios.

"Lucky 7s, for where it was, stayed pretty busy," Marcotte said. "But here you can walk in any day and it may look a little empty, but we do a lot more custom work now and big pieces, so some days you walk in and don't see any activity, but everyone is booked up."

Because large custom pieces take a lot of time, the artists will block out several hours for each client and may not have time to squeeze in someone who happens to walk in off the street. Marcotte said his crew is usually booked two or more weeks in advance, but can sometimes accommodate walk-ins.

"Sittings take anywhere from two and a half to three hours," he said. "We do still do a lot of smaller tattoos, but our clientelle is getting more into tattoos. We have a lot of repeat customers."

Just a few doors down across the street at 1916 Savannah Hwy. sits Holy City Tattoo. The studio has been open in it's current location a little more than six months. Owner Eisenberg recently relocated the shop from upper King street, where it had been for three years.

"We have a much more diverse clinetelle here," Eisenberg said. "the problem we had with the old location is a lot of people didn't feel comfortable going there, they only knew the area as the place where all the strips clubs are."

Collins moved into the spot Marcotte left at 1856 Belgrade Ave., and opened Broken Lantern Tattoo last October. He initially ran a shop in Monks Corner, but got tired of the commute from his home in West Ashely every day.

"It's such a different atmosphere here," Collins said. "There's not a ton of walk-ins, we're a little off the beaten path, but we stay pretty busy with appointments. I'm booked two to three weeks out."

Eisenberg said he always wanted to have a shop in West Ashley, and the spots where Holy City, Iron Lotus and Broken Lantern have set up fall outside the corporate limits of the City of Charleston which imposes greater restrictions on the business than Charleston County.

"We're in West Ashley because it's in the county and they allow us to be near other businesses, not just strip clubs and crematories," Eisenberg said.

Marcotte and Collins both moved to South Carolina after the state legalized their trade.

"I lived in North Carolina when I heard it was being legalized here," Collins said. "I started looking for a place here, but it's so hard to find a place to open one, it's almost impossible in South Carolina."

"The hoops (you have to jump through) aren't impossible, but you can't just hang a sign," Eisenberg said. "But we are in a state that didn't want it in the first place."

"The hoops they give you to jump through, the end result is always worth it," he added.

Eisenberg grew up in Charleston and the trade was illegal here when he began learning to tattoo in the mid 1990s. He has been inking professionally for 12 years and moved back to town after legalization. Including Eisenberg, Holy City has three artists, each with at least four years experience in the business.

"There is no Flash in my shop," Eisenberg said referring to tattoo art that people can pick off the walls at many shops to have embedded in their skin. "If you're going to work in my shop I expect a certain level of tattoo ability."

Marcotte also prefers original work to Flash and hasn't hung any examples of it his new shop, though he still has thousands of pieces from Lucky 7s in storage.

Collins said while he likes to create original pieces, he also enjoys doing Flash tattoos as well.

"I usually prefer to do custom stuff, but some days pulling Flash off the wall is good too," he said. "I like doing everything as long as I'm working."

Collins works with two other artists at Broken Lantern, both with about five years experience. Collins has been working professionally for 10 years. He said he spent five years trying to find an artist to apprentice under before he finally got one.

"I didn't want to just pick up a machine at the house and start messing up people or spreading disease," Collins said.

Marcotte, who has been tattooing professionally for more than six years, has four other artists at Iron Lotus, all with between five and 17 years experience. He is originally from Los Angeles and moved around the country before coming to Charleston.

Marcotte's crew designed and built-out the Iron Lotus Studios space from the inside. He said he doesn't think of his artists as employees, but rather as a family.

Even the shop name is a collaboration between Marcotte and one of his artists, Wells, a 17-year industry veteran who goes by a single name.

"I was looking for a name, and I kept thinking, thinking, thinking and then Wells said he wanted a shop called Iron Lotus, and his old shop was Pul$e Studios in Ohio," Marcotte said. "I thought studio sounded better than tattoo parlor, so I threw 'studios' at the end of Iron Lotus and that's what stuck."

He said finding a place to lease for the business was more difficult than meeting S.C. DHEC and Charleston County regulations, and it had a lot to do with the way he phrased his inquiries.

"It took almost two and a half, three years to find a new place," he said. "I'd call property owners and try to put it to them different ways, but once you say the word parlor, they closed down fast."

Despite their proximity the shop owners don't really view each other as competition. Each artist and each shop has it's own style and the vast majority of customers these days are researching tattoo artists online, and asking other people with ink they like for referrals before they ever walk into a shop, the owners say.

"When Jason had his (zoning) hearing I went down and spoke in his favor," Marcotte said. "One of the first things they said is 'You're up here asking us to approve your competition?' But he has his own clients. People go to him for his art, the same way people come to us because they like our art. We refer people to each other."

Reality TV not helping

None of the three are happy about the explosion of tattoo based reality shows though. At best Eisenberg said the shows are a double-edge sword.

"It's desensitized people and made it more tolerable, but we're never going to be totally accepted," he said. "But if the TV shows and the commercial shit at Walmart is going to make a little old lady not clutch her purse when I walk by that's great."

On the other hand he said the networks have squandered ample opportunities to educate people about the art of tattooing and what to look for when searching for a good artist in favor of playing up drama for a home audience.

"It's like getting kicked in our teeth by a network."

"I'm definitely not a fan," Collins said. "They do a lot of things that are not professional. We always had a kind of code that we followed and they kind of exploited it."

Shows like Miami Ink and L.A. Ink have fostered unrealistic expectations in prospective clients who are not familiar with tattooing, they said.

"They make it look like you can get a huge piece that takes like 25 hours finished in under 15 minutes," Eisenberg said.

"They've glamorized and dramatized tattooing," Marcotte said. "People see those shows and think you can become famous and get rich tattooing. Most artists don't want that kind of spotlight."

The popularity of the shows has led to a glut of artists in the tattoo market, they said, and because anybody can watch how to videos online and buy cheap equipment the market and the reputation of the art form is suffering.

"We used to decide who would learn, now anyone can Google a YouTube video and see how," Eisenberg said. "It's an unfortunate reality of popularity."

"I don't particularly like that now you see all this tattoo apparel stuff in Walmart and Target, it's glamorizing it," he added. "It's kind of insulting to me, someone in a cubicle somewhere with no connection to tattooing is designing a T-shirt and mass producing it in China."

However that disgust has inspired Marcotte and Wells to begin work on their own line of tattoo apparel.

At the end of the day, though the tattoo business is all about the art and the clients, they said. Most of the shop owners and the artists working for them also paint and draw on canvass and paper in addition to skin.

"My favorite tattoo is always the last one I did," Eisenberg said. "My clients are the most amazing people to me. They pay me to draw on them. They pay me to wear shorts to work, to be the same guy I was in high school when everyone was telling me you have to do this and you have to do that."

"Well apparently I didn't have to do shit," he said. "I've grown up and haven't changed, I've kind of perfected it."