Alameda tattoo begins

All right people, here is the first installation (of many) into this here blog site thingy..
I will first start by saying its been 20 years of tattooing in the East Bay for me and the time has come for me to open up a shop with my good friend Brian Hutflies.

Our journey this far has been a very time consuming task indeed.. It took nine months from the start to finish and thousands of dollars to finally get thru the city and get the keys into our gruby little mitt's.. But we did it and now the fun begins.. We are at 650 Haight street, the cross is Webster and we are right where we wanted to be, just a little bit off of the main st.  We are hoping to be open around mid April or May..  The space is small.. REAL small but in reality, all we need is a space to create killer art and tattoos with minimal things going on around us for distractions.. Its more of a studio really and that's all we need... We have trimmed all the fat and all that's left is art and tattoo's..  No piercings, no stuff for sale, just art.

The picture above was taken after the public hearing at city hall.. (Brian is on the left with his daughter and myself Reed on the right) Complaints were filed at city hall by people that did not want to see us open a tattoo studio in their city and in fact tattooing has been illegal in the city of Alameda since 1974 so unless you were grandfathered in, you are out of luck.  Opening a tattoo shop in Alameda just, was not going to happen.. As someone that worked in city hall said, it was "going to be an up hill battle".. Well we have never been afraid of a battle so we started making phone calls and finally after a few days contacted a woman named Kathy Moerhing, who ran the Webster street business association and was instrumental in us get thru city hall and all of the hoops we had to jump through (thanks Kathy!).. Hey it didn't hurt at all, that I tattooed her about ten years ago either! Thanks to Brian Stanke and Andrew Thomas at city hall as well!!
Lastly I would like to thank ALL of the many people that wrote city hall for us, without you none of this would have been possible!!!  Like I said it took 9 long months a few head aches, dozens of letters, lots of research, ALOT of freinds and some cold hard cash to get this ball rolling. so lets move on and do this thing!!   Please stop by the studio check us out and set up an appointment!!
Cheeers!!! Reed

Website is coming soon...