The fi rst of the brittle pages, yellowed and curled at the tips, shows a woman screaming the words “Weirdos!” and “These guys make me puke!” Inside is a dark story detailing how Poulos, his wife and two others had gone to Phoenix to collect $4,600 from a man named Jeffery Sam Dawson, an amateur tattoo artist who had taken two ounces of cocaine from Poulos. “Dawson was an entry-level tattooer, a thug with ties to the outlaw-biker scene,” Pew says. “Peter tried to teach him to tattoo, but he had no talent for anything but fi nding trouble.” Poulos entered the house while his wife tattooing for a while before opening a shop in Durango in the ’90s and then in Buena Vista. She returned to Denver to work with Pew when he opened his shop in 2017. “After Peter died, everybody started going crazy again with fi rebombing and other bullshit and trying to take power, from the ’80s to the ’90s,” Schaefer recalls. Violent competitors weren’t the only problem during this era. As the AIDs epi- demic swept across the U.S., tattooing be- came embroiled in a catastrophic health crisis. The National Tattoo Association worked with health departments to create for people instead of making them choose things off the wall. And with that, we also wanted to bring more of a marriage of body piercing and tattooing together. ... It was in the late ’90s that we rebirthed shops that had more to them, more stories — I would say the modern primitives, the tribal aspect that we were more culturally respectful. We were talking about doing things for other reasons than being a rebel or being sexual. We explored all the subcultures of people we could have as clients. It was no longer about if you weren’t cool enough or tattooed enough. You wouldn’t walk into the shop opened a shop, they would come and demand a percentage, or they would blow up your shop, or they would hammer your hands and you would never tattoo again,” Slaughter adds. When he met Romano, “I was a little scared,” he admits. “But we hung out and got along really well.” In fact, Romano offered Slaughter a job at any of the Tat-2 Associa- tion shops in Phoenix, New York or Denver. “I was like, ‘Dude, I like you, but I would never work for you,’” Slaughter says. “And he respected people like that.” Slaughter says that he knew people whose hands were hammered and whose shops were Alicia Cardenas, founder of Sol Tribe Tattoo, was killed on December 27. and friends remained outside. Dawson, who’d noticed that his house had been bro- ken into earlier, was ready with a double- barrel shotgun. Poulos came through the taped-shut window, saw Dawson and told him, “Well, you better shoot.” Dawson, who said that he thought Pou- los’s intentions ranged “anywhere from breaking my arms and legs to killing me,” proceeded to shoot Poulos in the hand and, as Poulos continued moving toward him, shot him fatally in the chest. As Poulos’s cohorts hopped in their car and took off, Dawson yelled to his neighbors to call the police: “I’ve just shot someone for trespassing.” Dawson, who was protected by Arizona’s “Make My Day” law, went into hiding; he was afraid Poulos’s loyal “Tat-2 Mafi a” would hunt him down. “You could feel the heat when you were around him,” Dawson told the reporter. “If you talked to him, he could be the nicest guy in the world. Then he could change from night to day and do it on a dime.” Schaefer says that she knew Dawson before the killing, but never heard from him afterward. Romano immediately took over the Peter Tat-2 Association businesses. Schaefer left the shop after Romano took over. “He was scary; he was fucking crazy,” she emphasizes. “I wasn’t sticking around. … But I was looking over my shoulders forever, because you weren’t supposed to leave the company. There was an ownership thing back in the day; it was Tat-2 Mafi a. But I can’t talk about a lot of that. I know too much shit from the past.” In fact, Schaefer left Denver and quit sanitation protocols, which were adopted nationwide as the business became more professional than ever before. Alicia Cardenas grew up in Denver and started tattooing at a young age. Early on, she became involved in the industry’s em- phasis on safety and health regulations. She was an instructor for the National Safety Council for twenty years, teaching classes about bloodborne pathogens, and served on the board of directors for the Association of Professional Piercers. But she was looking at other changes, too. She wanted to make the industry both more inclusive and more creative. After working at multiple shops where she cou ldn’t fi nd the Kim Schaefer at Denver City Tattoo Club, where she currently works. and be scared away; you were welcomed in.” John Slaughter, who founded Tribe Tat- too in the Art District on Santa Fe 21 years ago, was another artist who emerged in the ’90s with a desire to change the tattoo environment, though he certainly respects its history. His shop has a different feel from DCTC’s vintage vibe. Oldies play over the speakers, muted TVs show various pro- grams, and artists perch on velvet cushioned seats while they design new work. Slaughter smudges the space every day with sage. “I got my fi rst tattoo in my best friend’s basement when I was thirteen,” he recalls with a laugh. “I got an ankh, and it somewhat resembles one, but I got in the car and my mom was like, ‘You’re an idiot.’” The friend who tattooed him that day ended up working for the Tat-2 Association. “It was no longer about if you weren’t cool enough or tattooed enough. You wouldn’t walk into the shop and be scared away; you were welcomed in.” artistic atmosphere she sought, she opened her own shop, Twisted Sol, in 1996. “In the late ’90s, we decided that we were gonna do shops with no fl ash on the walls — we were going to take it into this new, artsy realm,” Cardenas recalled. “We were just going to do only our own art and draw things “They pretty much revolutionized tattoo- ing,” Slaughter attests. “Peter actually started mixing colors, changing up the entire game of tattooing. Instead of just red, yellow, green, blue, he started mixing and doing shading and bringing tattooing into life. “But Larry was mafi a. When he knew you bombed. “It happened all the time,” he recalls. “That’s why there were only a couple of shops back in the day. Everyone was scared of Larry; you didn’t mess around with him. He would fi nd you in a dark alley, and that would be it. He owned you. And that was scary. “Back then, that was the tattoo world,” Slaughter continues. “If you wanted to be a part of it, you had to get marked, and he owned you. Back in the day, it was fl esh and blood to be a part of this.” Slaughter and Cardenas were among the artists working to change that. “It’s not like back in the day, where you didn’t mess around with tattoo shops or you’d get your ass kicked,” Slaughter explains. Now the cli- entele has shifted to everyone from doctors to priests to celebrities: Slaughter says he has tattooed most of the Denver Nuggets players. There’s been a shift not just in who gets tatted, but in who does the tattooing. “I don’t think anyone would even consider getting a tattoo from a gay person back in the day with- out that person being beat up or something. It was such a highly male-dominated, crazy world back then,” Slaughter says. “Now it’s more about the art, the people expressing themselves outwardly instead of just being a tough-guy thing.” Slaughter sees tattooing as a spiritual practice, and he encourages his employees to take the same view. He’s a Sundancer and has been praying with the Lakota Indians for over three decades; he honors the Indig- enous roots of tattooing, referencing how historically, shamans continued on page 12 11 westword.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | WESTWORD JANUARY 20-26, 2022 JAKE COX COURTESY OF DENVER CITY TATTOO CLUB
