Northeast News staff

Since last fall, the Northeast News has been bringing our readers stories about artists and musicians in our community, but we have yet to bring you the stories of tattoo artists living and working in Northeast.

With the Fifth Annual Kansas City Tattoo Arts Convention coming to the Sheraton at Crown Center this weekend, we saw this as a fun opportunity to bring our readers an entire issue filled with stories about the impact tattoos make on the lives of so many people in Northeast.

Once an art form that was largely viewed as taboo, associated with sailors or counter-culture, tattooing as an art form has evolved into the mainstream, with numerous people across racial and economic spectrums investing in permanent artwork on their bodies.

While most tattoos still tend to be discreet, according to a New York Times story published on August 4, 2018 titled “Face Tattoos Go Mainstream,” these kinds of obligatory designs are no longer limited to musicians, bartenders, and overnight shelf stockers. We’re not entirely sure about that whole face tattoo thing, but we’ll let you be the judge.

Regardless of how our readers feel about tattoos, we believe that the World Of Tattoo Art can be seen all over Northeast, thus warranting further exploration. The artists we sat down with told us many compelling stories and gave us unprecedented access to their background, how they got into the industry, and their thoughts on where the art of tattooing is headed.

We hope that our readers enjoy this Special Tattoo Edition of the Northeast News, and take away something interesting and worthwhile.

As a tribute to those who sling the ink, we’ve adopted a fitting masthead that showcases a number of the more popular tattoos, including sugar skulls, cherries, dice and stars. As part of this week’s edition, we’ll also be giving away tickets to this weekend’s tattoo convention at Crown Center.

Check our digital edition for information on how you can score tickets by sending us a photo of your most “regertable” tattoo.