Black Anchor

Owner and sole artist

Mickey Vargas

Fourteen years on the machine, twelve of them in this room.

Mickey apprenticed in Sacramento under a sign painter turned tattooer, which is where the bold lines and the flat, unfussy colour come from. She opened Black Anchor in 2012 with two chairs and eventually gave the second one up, on the grounds that she would rather do sixty tattoos a year properly than two hundred in a hurry.

The house style is American traditional: eagles, panthers, roses, banners, work that still reads at fifty feet in twenty years. The other half of the book is large-scale Japanese-influenced pieces, sleeves and backpieces built to flow with the body and drawn across several sittings before a needle comes out.

She takes cover-ups and reworks, and will tell you at the consultation whether black ink can honestly fix what you have or whether you would be happier leaving it alone.