Making Their Mark continued from page 11 were the only ones considered spiritual enough to mark someone for life. “Not anyone can go and mark someone forever, and that’s what I tell people who come to me,” he says. “You have to be that sacred person and walk on that road with the person you’re tattoo- ing in that good state of mind. And that’s a hard thing, because we’re all human, too.” Slaughter and Carde- nas had been friends for years. “I knew her since she was a kid,” he says. “If you don’t know Alicia or at least know of her, then you’re not a part of this community. … I re- member Alicia telling me when I opened my shop: ‘Good for you. There’s enough to go around.’” That in itself was a sig- nal of a new era for tattoo shop owners, he says. “She didn’t say any- thing negative about me opening,” he remembers. “There’s enough to go around, there’s a lot of peo- ple around here. But you have to be respectful of your community or you’ll get rocks thrown at your window. A lot of these kids, they don’t want to put the time into it. … If you want to be a part of this, there’s some old-school stuff and logic that has to stay and won’t go away.” That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved, however. In December, Cardenas spoke of the importance of respect in the industry, including giving existing shops a heads-up before moving your own shop in down the street. “Those types of things are really lost in this coming age,” she said. “Part of integrity is about knowing where you fall in it all and having a good understanding of who all is around you.” Cardenas was also working to “rewrite 12 the apprenticeship model” so that more people of color would be included in the business. Too many apprentices were treated terribly and went unpaid for years, she said, making it diffi cult to enter the industry if you were in diffi cult economic circumstances, the sort that people of color statistically endure. “I have been building my tattoo shop vision since day one about making a space that was more inclusive and more friendly to different walks of life, the queer community — taking it out of the biker, prisoner sort of realm and getting it into a space where any- one who wanted to could walk in and get a good tattoo and feel comfortable,” she said. “And that’s really what it’s about,” she continued. “Taking it out of this history of bad behavior that’s undeniable when you have a whole industry born off of people who come out of prison or who have embraced this alternative lifestyle — there’s gonna be drugs and misogyny and abuse. But the part where it’s been reborn, where people who are nonbinary have a voice — that’s been going on for a while, that’s been manifesting and switching and evolving for at least the last 25 years.” Still, she noted, full inclusivity also al- lowed more traditional, macho parlors — This is Rose’s third iteration of the Wolf Den, and even before it opened in a space once occupied by another tattoo parlor, all of the materials were stolen. “The landlord forgot to change the locks, and the artists who owned it before came in and stole almost all our things,” Rose says. Then someone threw rocks through the window. That was mild compared to Cardenas’s McLeod was condescending and called himself a writer. “He would speak in very ambiguous riddles where he wanted you to ask more questions, but I just never did,” Rose says. “He was always wearing black and tactical clothing. He’d have his shirt tucked into his cargo pants, and he always had a gun. He would always allude that there was more weaponry in his car, which was matte black and tinted.” Rose remembers him saying, “You can run my shop, but just don’t ever touch my shit in the back.” The back room was painted black and decorated with bones, feathers and other mor- bidities. One wall had a ledge on which McLeod would stack candles, burning them until they melted into a tower of wax on the wall. He also had some impres- sive books — “heavy literature like The Com- munist Manifesto and The Masterpiece,” Rose remembers — that he would relabel with new titles: “I think he thought he was better than the writers and could name the books better. He Sharpied out the title of The Masterpiece and renamed it ‘The Works.’” But then Rose noticed John Slaughter (left), founder of Tribe Tattoo, and, Ryane Rose, founder of the Wolf Den. what she called “good ol’ boy shops” — to stay around, even if some industry newcomers dislike them. “Maybe it’s because I’m almost fi fty, but it doesn’t bother me, because people need what they need from tattoo shops,” she said. “Magic happens in those studios, too.” The Wolf Den just opened on East Colfax Avenue this fall. It’s owned by Ryane Rose, who is nonbinary and only hires women tat- too artists with the goal of fostering a safe, therapeutic and nurturing environment. The shop created a visual arts gallery in its foyer to extend its reach to local artists who may not be making the cash that tattoo artists can collect. Despite all of the progress in the industry, Rose still sees a misogynist cloud hanging over the industry, with owners who aren’t willing to let go of toxic traditions like ha- rassing new shops or hazing apprentices. The tattoo culture is “really aggressive,” Rose says. “It’s still a hard barrier that I’m gently trying to break. The mentality was, ‘If you take this client from me, then you’re taking food from me.’ No, there’s enough for everyone. That’s why I named this the Wolf Den. We will all eat if we work together. We’ll eat more, we’ll eat better, we’ll eat more frequently.” recollection of being beaten with a pistol and having her shop shot up in the ’90s, or Schae- fer and Pew describing how Kott’s shop was burned to the ground by competitors. But to Rose, the actions still signaled that changes had to be made. Before opening the Wolf Den, Rose worked at the newer Peter Tat-2 location on East Colfax for a while. “I tried to get hired at Sol Tribe, and Alicia said I was too green,” Rose recalls. “I went to Fallen Owl, and they said the same. But they were very encouraging.” Rose fi nally answered an ad for a shop manager on Craigslist and was hired at All Heart Industries in 2015. That’s the tattoo shop at 246 West Sixth Avenue that was owned by Lyndon McLeod, who committed the December 27 killings. He shot up that address, too. “The detective I spoke to was fl oored,” Rose says. “Lyndon was alone. He has no loved ones, nothing. No one who he tattooed has come forward to talk about him. The detective said they are just trying to put the pieces together of how perplexed and how narcissistic this person was. And he made the puzzle hard for a reason.” When Rose got the job, McLeod said the responsibilities would be managing the shop, hiring artists and taking over day-to-day operations. But soon McLeod cut off com- munication and would often speak to Rose through an assistant, “who always seemed to be scared,” Rose remembers. that McLeod’s personal bills were all going to All Heart, and the cash flow wasn’t adding up. “I know at that time he was making a lot of money illegally growing weed,” Rose attests. And one day, the health department did a run-through. Rose recalls the department inspector asking how long the shop had been there and noting that it was violating zoning and licensing laws; McLeod hadn’t renewed his license, despite his proclama- tions otherwise. Rose left to work at Peter Tat-2, and re- members McLeod continuously calling in threats. But that was part of the usual pat- tern for the industry. “To this day, when I have hired a new artist, their old bosses will harass them for about a month and then let it go,” Rose says. “So I’ll bet the owner of Tat-2 at the time didn’t bat an eye. But I came to fi nd out Lyndon meant everything he said.” After McLeod lost All Heart, Cardenas briefl y expanded her shop into the space before opening Sol Tribe on Broadway. Ac- cording to Rose, McLeod had said that he’d tried to do business with Cardenas in the past and she’d turned him down. It had enraged him, and he remained furious. Denver detectives have been going through McLeod’s writings, which reveal a bitter, outraged man who believed intensely in male supremacy and alt-right philoso- phies. McLeod wrote three books in which a character sharing his name has a mission to murder 46 people, and goes into a tattoo shop and kills a woman named Alicia Cardenas JANUARY 20-26, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com COURTESY OF JOHN SLAUGHTER COURTESY OF RYANE ROSE
