Denver’s Identity Crisis

In 2007, Denver-based tattoo artist and Think Tank Tattoo shop owner Jake Bray stood shivering on the street outside Purple Lotus, which was once his apprenticeship shop in Frisco, Colorado. The brisk Summit County air nipped at one’s toes even when fully clothed, a luxury Bray didn’t have that day.

His bare feet met the frosted pavement with an unsettling sort of comfort, the kind only an apprentice with nothing left to prove — and very little to warm — could manage. Snowflakes clung to his leg hair, glowing in the haze of his own breath as he took off on the route he knew far too well.

After Bray toweled off the snow from his arms, the grind continued beneath the shop’s heaters inside. He pieced back together the guts of a dismantled tattoo machine left for him the night prior, then leaned into the meticulous work of inking tribal lines and Kanji-style characters, all long before he’d earned approval for custom designs. Pass after pass, the lesson stayed the same.

Old-guarded apprenticeships broke wills down to a pulp, leaving only a raw hunger for the tattooing lifestyle. Add to that the vulnerability of a mentor looming behind you, painstakingly critiquing every stroke. Some artists, like Travis Koenig of Denver’s Bound By Design, no stranger to Bray’s kind of initiation, consider that a form of “self-hatred.” Still, “drawing on people is cool,” Koenig said, noting that it carries a lasting responsibility to both the craft and clients who wear those designs for life, even if the artists themselves don’t have retirement plans.

Culture Clash

Both Think Tank and Bound By Design were among the few reputable shops available to Denverites through the mid- to late-2000s. But in 2012, Colorado’s legalization of marijuana collided with the rise of social media. Platforms like Instagram hit their golden era, giving artists a new, expansive way to market themselves. That intersection sparked a wave of tattooers heading West in search of space, autonomy, and their own curated clientele.

Bray followed suit, moving to Denver in 2015 and joining the Think Tank team. He squeezed into the notably small booths, working shoulder to shoulder with heavyweights like Scottie Deville, Adam Rosenthal, and Rick Brown.

Koenig, already in the city, noticed the shift too — both the surge of artistic talent and an unexpected camaraderie among the scene. Shops began supporting and learning from one another rather than fending off rival artists and their motorcycle crews.

Even though there were no Molotov cocktails to worry about, 2020 had other plans. When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered shops across Denver, the familiar buzz of tattoo machines fell silent. Conversely, the yearning for ink only grew, resulting in more demand than supply. Skilled illustrators and hobbyists alike, with more time than patience, took matters into their own hands. And, with Amazon’s two-day Prime delivery just a click away, tattoo machines, needles, and ink arrived on doorsteps with no licensure required.

With needles now accessible to anyone who could hold a pencil, COVID-era tattooers sprouted across Denver like wildfire. Some still sought mentorship, walking into shops to demand knowledge and declare raw talent, but that overconfidence often outpaced discipline. Many of those self-taught artists were consequently turned away because their egos refused to walk the necessary line for that lifestyle. Yet those very artists still believed that their wings, glued together by Amazon Basics, could fly them to the same sun of notoriety and accolades others had fought to earn.

But even Icarus learned the hard way that ignoring warnings only hastened the fall. Many of those self-taught artists, with chipped shoulders and resentment toward anyone who gatekeeps the craft, opened their own private studios in response. Most resemble boutique spas serving cucumber water on silver platters rather than classic shops lined with flash walls and filled with chattering artists acting as creative springboards. Those ring-light-soaked storefronts multiplied faster than anyone could track, prioritizing aesthetics and Instagram follower counts.

The Fallout

Tattooing demands a keen ear more than glam, from disinfecting equipment properly, to mastering healing technique, and even understanding how to price work fairly. For a once-respected industry, a new generation has mistaken access for expertise, leaving the gates of Denver’s tattoo world in ruin. Veterans Bray and Koenig sit in this gaping opening with rusted iron bars around them. They are now wary of taking apprentices at all, with rare exceptions for those they’ve known for years. Ultimately, “nothing good comes easy,” Koenig said, adding that the real test lies in a person’s character.

Thankfully for Angel Ramirez, current apprentice at Denver’s Ritual Tattoo owned by William Crandall, his decade-long connection to the shop and immersion in the scene allowed his grounded persona to shine, a quality Crandall recognized from the start.

Now two years into his apprenticeship, Ramirez often peers over Crandall’s shoulder, studying each pressurized pass of the needle and subtle shift in angle. The craft has much to teach, after all, despite Ramirez’s years of adjacent knowledge. Even the so-called “simpler” styles, like American Traditional, can be deceptively tricky due to using a single needle thickness across multiple design elements, making every slip of the finger painfully visible.

Crandall may not send Ramirez on naked runs down Denver’s streets, but he still keeps him on his toes. Maybe it’s a brightly colored wig slipped on while tattooing a client, or a faint blue tint on his hands from an unassuming glove laced with a lethal dose of stencil fluid. Shops like Ritual Tattoo and those harmless pranks are intentional efforts to preserve the classic walk-in atmosphere and moral backbone that built this culture from the ground up, paying homage to the steps required to secure your place in a lineage rooted in history.

That kind of altruistic echo sits in stark contrast to the rise of private studios, where everyone’s tattooed with thought-out arm sleeves that blend into backpieces and bloom into full-bodied tapestries. Even when the hoodies and ski passes come out for the winter, the integrity of those designs and the people who wear them hold the Western Front Range strong, whether anyone sees the ink or not.

The real difference, though, isn’t who wears the ink. It’s who’s earned the right to make it. And in a landscape where the lines between tradition and progression have blurred, it’s becoming nearly impossible to tell where one design ends and another begins.