If you can't find a tattoo shop on East Colfax Avenue, you just aren't trying very hard.
On a stretch of Colfax starting at Logan Street and ending just a shade under a mile away at Race Street, four tattoo shops provide central Denver and points beyond all manner of body modification services, but mostly the grandfather of them all: ink.
Some of these shops, like the
Romano brothers' (
Larry and
Richie) Capitol Hill Tattoo, which opened in 1978, have been fixtures on Denver's main street while dozens of other small business have risen and fallen.
Shane Adair, a relocated Texan who inks at Capitol Hill Tattoo, said the street's unique combination of legitimate and not-so-legitimate residents makes for an interesting and steady stream of customers.
"We get everyone, from police officers to hookers to crack dealers to local businessmen," he said.
The other artist at Capitol Hill, former high school art teacher
Eli Short, added that their customers pull up to the stop in everything "from Pintos to Bentleys."
"We're even getting grandchildren of people who have been tattooed here coming in with stories now," Short said.
Down the street at Lifetime of Sol, a small, two-level shop nestled between a jewelry store and a rental store, artist
Walter McDonald says he doesn't buy the mythology of Colfax's danger.
"I've just got this love affair with tattooing and doing it in a street shop is a real big part of it," he said. "Even though we're completely clean and hygienic , there's still something a little shady about people coming in off the streets that makes it exciting."
John Ford opened up shop in that space in September of 2001 and is now operated by Twisted Sol, another shop that itself is only a block south of Colfax.
The owners of that store,
Mike Nickels and
Alicia Cardenas, got their start at the other long-lived shop in the area, the neon-adorned Emporium of Design, co-founded by ex-Safeway truck driver, biker and local tattooing legend
Sugar Bear.
Since splitting the $500 to buy an old barber shop with his business partner
Paul Ullerich in 1978, Sugar Bear and the Emporium have helped cultivate Denver's tattoo scene, and the way he tells it, their progeny are catching up to them.
"Denver's got a lot of really great artists who are opening up shops here and in the suburbs, so we've got to keep updating our shop to keep up with the new stores," he said.
That keeping up with the Joneses mindset spawned a two-year remodeling of the store that is nearly finished (Including the iconic neon signs in the shop's front windows, which were custom created by Ullerich's son,
Dusty, an artist at the shop), not to mention the pair's expansion into biker heaven, South Dakota.
Ullerich and Sugar Bear own two tattoo shops in Sturgis as well as the city's novelty-famous Roadkill Cafe. Every August, Sugar Bear takes a caravan of a dozen or so of his current and former resident artists to his Sturgis shops to satisfy the huge demand for ink during the Sturgis Rally.
The store currently has 7 to 8 artists on call, including a pair of retired police officers and longtime members of the Denver ink scene,
Dan and
George Makalandar, and several up-and-coming artists.
Competition doesn't seem to be a problem for the shops, despite their close confines.
"I love the Colfax scene. It's got a great community feel," Haggard said. "I dig it."
"We all offer something different, so I think we'll all be OK," Aldair said.
As East Colfax is experiencing something of a boom, with new stores, restaurants and residences popping up regularly, what does Sugar Bear think of the last three decades of change? "People have tried to dress it up a little, but East Colfax is still East Colfax."
_________________________________