Making Their Mark continued from page 9 Denver City Tattoo Club could be a museum of Denver’s tattoo history. Nikolas Pew, who opened the shop at 3451 Larimer Street in 2017, has covered the walls with fl ash by leg- endary artists from this city and beyond. Pew got his start in tattooing at a young age; family friends Greg and Peggy Skibo, the owners of shops in Cheyenne, Greeley and Fort Collins, showed him the ropes decades ago. “There is history on these walls,” Pew says. “There are certain artists who are from Den- ver or spent time in Denver who are special to me. I wanted to make sure to fi nd a home for those pieces, because they’re relevant to what I’m trying to do with this studio.” The walls feature fl ash from many gape- worthy artists: Rex Ross, Mickie Kott, Ed- ward Lee, Peter Tat-2 and David Gibson, whom Ross taught. “Gibson is considered one of the all-time greats, a legend,” Pew says. “Rex was Dave Gibson’s mentor. A lot of people don’t know that he started tattooing in Denver. He became a very well-known and respected tattooist; he was a really good sign painter, too, and he lettered the windows at Peter’s shop.” Flash, particularly that of the caliber on Pew’s walls, became popular again as tat- too artists and clients began exploring the industry’s history and roots. Pew compares it to music: Even as new genres emerge, people always seem to acknowledge and have an admiration for the classics. But no one appreciates the past more than 10 Pew. “Red Gibbons is one of the earliest tat- tooers to have a shop in Denver, back in the ’30s,” he says. “He tattooed out of an arcade on Curtis Street, and he was the husband of the most famous tattooed woman of that time, Artoria Gibbons.” He also recalls R.J. Rosini, who tattooed in Denver in the ’70s and ’80s with his partner “Sneakin’ Deacon,” whom Pew describes as “a biker poet and tat- tooer, kind of a Kerouac of the tattoo world; he made several books.” Omnipresent in those early days were other outlaw types, including notorious Denver tattooer Edward Lee. “His fl ash was very ‘hot’ for how young he was; his style was very much infl uenced by Frank Speaker and Mickie Kott; they kind of took him under their wing,” Pew says. “His art had a punk rock/biker element to it — really cool ’80s-style stuff. He ended up going to prison for a very long time for murdering somebody. I think the tattoo community embraced him because he was an outlaw; he got into tattooing at a very young age, and he could draw.” Mickie Kott was one of the female artists who got her start in Denver. “She teamed up with legends Greg Skibo, Frank Speaker and Edward Lee to form Metro Tattoo around 1990,” Pew says. “That shop was fi rebombed by a jealous competitor. After that, she re- opened as Tattooing by Mickie.” The most infamous tattooer of all is de- picted in a prominent photo in the studio, grinning between three topless women pos- ing on a leopard-print blanket. “That’s Peter Tat-2,” says Denver City Tattoo Club’s Kim Schaefer. “And that woman there is me.” Peter “Tat-2” Poulos worked to change the tattoo industry’s reputation not just here, but in Long Island and Phoenix. Schaefer works at DCTC because it reminds her of Poulos’s shop at 1118 Broadway, where she fi rst cut her teeth in the business 45 years ago. “The reason I came back here is because Nik knows the past,” she says. “Peter would have loved this place. I learned how to tattoo off these very sheets.” Schaefer had been studying to become an educator at Western State College when she fi rst walked into the Broadway shop in the late ’70s, and Poulos marked her with her fi rst tattoo: a butterfl y. He later asked her to work for him. Poulos’s crew — known as the Peter Tat-2 Association — was very exclusive, and you could tell who’d been welcomed into it by the snake tattooed on their left hand. cascades of thick silver hair. She was one of many women Poulos hired at a time when women weren’t often seen as part of the industry. “I haven’t done an interview since the ’80s,” she admits. “There’s been a lot of talent in Denver over the years,” Pew says. “Everyone kind of wanted to be friends with Peter. He was very infl uential; he worked hard to become a really good tattooist — one of the best. That is Kim’s lineage. There have been a lot of fantastic women tattooers who have called Denver home, and I think that’s really special — not that it’s totally unique to us, but it is something that is prevalent here.” Inspired by nationwide tattoo groups in Scotland and Japan, Poulos and his wife, “Peter and his wife really had that infl uence, even though he was a newer-generation tat- tooer at that time. He had the pull to call on these guys, and people knew who he was. He was able to get everyone involved. That was a real turning point in tattooing, and it just happened to be in Denver.” But the power of the Pouloses was not an accident. “Dyane and Peter were together from an early age; they grew up in Brooklyn, and in my opinion, she was a big part of his success,” Pew says. “They had humble beginnings, and her business sense, vision and no-bullshit attitude, along with Peter’s talent, shaped the PTA into what it ultimately became. She was pretty, petite and could be sweet as pie, but if you crossed her, you would suffer for it. She had the type of personality that demanded respect; she had no remorse for anyone who betrayed the association. She taught the other girls at the shops how to carry themselves with class, integrity and, if need be, how to go into battle with a full heart to destroy anyone that got in their way.” Dusty Ullerich also witnessed the early days. His father, Paul Ullerich, was a Denver tattoo artist who’d been taken under Poulos’s wing and became part of the National Tattoo Association. “In 1978, my dad didn’t want to upset Peter and get into any tattoo war with him, because that would be a losing cause,” he recalls. “Since they were already buddies, he asked Peter if he could take over an existing shop instead of opening a competitor shop. That’s when he started the Emporium of Design.” Ullerich was six. “I rode there in the bus after school every chance I got, and the next thing you know, I was earning my allowance money building needles and mixing ink,” he says. “I actually built needles for a lot of other tattoo shops in town.” The National Tattoo Association is still around, but it no longer holds conventions — largely because tattoo conventions are happening weekly all around the country, Pew says. Schaefer’s business cards read “Tat-2 Kim, formerly of Peter Tat-2 Studio.” She says there aren’t many tattooers like her anymore: people who trace fl ash and don’t draw their own, but to whom tattooing is part of their nature. And she talks about some dark times with a sunny outlook. “Peter was kind of a controlling person,” Peter Poulos with Barbara Chapman (from left), Kim Schaefer and wife Dyane. His partner, Larry Romano, was known as the muscle of the operation. “Peter came to Denver from New York and was trying to change the image of tat- tooing so it wasn’t just convicts. I think that’s why he hired girls, mostly, to work. And we had to be really good girls, too,” Schaefer recalls. “We couldn’t be drunk and running around — there was a certain thing he wanted to portray. … Peter didn’t let us have boyfriends, really. He didn’t want any scumbags. He was really picky about shit.” At 66, Schaefer is still an undeniable beauty. Her expressive brown eyes are un- derscored by heavy, tattooed eyeliner; she has a rose tattooed under her right eye and Dyane, were influential in founding the National Tattoo Association (then called the National Tattoo Club) with other leaders of the industry, including Eddie Funk — known as “Crazy Philadelphia Eddie” — who served as the group’s president. Poulos and his wife hosted the fi rst convention in 1979 at the now-defunct Cosmopolitan Hotel in Denver. Although tattooer Dave Yurkew had held earlier conventions, the Pouloses and others decided to reboot the industry with their own. “Because of the people who were in- volved, all the greats and big-time artists, all the old-school guys, all the new guys — any- body who was anybody came,” Pew recalls. she says. “He had some heavies working for him, but they were all friends of his, and he was just trying to give them a chance. People who didn’t have anything. He’d teach them how to tattoo. It was working out pretty good until he started getting into some crazy shit. … He left one weekend and he never came back. “He got shot and killed on May 26, 1983. He was 36,” she says. “It was fi ve days before my 28th birthday. It was awful.” The killing of Poulos hit Denver’s tattoo com- munity hard, and it inspired many urban myths: that he was blindfolded and taken out to the desert in Arizona, where he was executed over a drug deal gone wrong; that he was taken out by a greedy associate. Pew brings out a 1983 cover story from Westword sister paper Phoenix New Times. It has an interview with the killer. JANUARY 20-26, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com COURTESY OF RYANE ROSE
