To someone who spends forty hours a week sitting and watching Austin’s Sixth Street crowds revel night after night, the street’s constant chaos becomes its own sort of routine. The tattoo artists at Sacrament Tattoo, between Neches and Red River streets, aren’t just familiar with the ebb and flow of any given Saturday night. Their business relies on it, too.
Wedged between a cantina and a pastry store, Sacrament is the former storefront of Affinity Tattoo. Redone with a coat of black paint last November, it’s been passed down from tattoo artist to tattoo artist since 1975, starting with Diamond Glenn’s River City Tattoo. Earlier this year, it fell into the hands of co-owners Barry Barthelemy and Chris “Drts” Aragon.
The pair started tattooing together on Sixth Street five years ago, in the same building. With almost forty years of experience between them, they’ve lived through the conversion of the art of tattooing from countercultural staple to a common topic on Pinterest boards. They came up when it was the apprentice’s job to solder their own needles, and know when to expect foot traffic and when to sit on the stoop outside and people-watch to pass the time.
When they’re inside the shop, behind the wall separating their workstations from the waiting area, their first line of defense is store manager Dalton Webster, who negotiates prices and gets all the liability paperwork signed before letting anyone through. Webster had fresh stitches on the top of his right hand when we first met. I figured it was from a fight; actually, he had just removed a sub-dermal piercing. But that isn’t to say he doesn’t get into tiffs from time to time. Barthelemy affectionately calls Webster the “buffer” between the tattoo artists and any passersby who may wander in after a little too much to drink.
Most customers walk in off the street without scheduling an appointment, Webster says. Then it’s his job to gauge how serious they are about getting tattooed, or whether they’re just there to check prices, use the bathroom, or fix their hair in the mirror. All customers must sign a consent form, which goes to the Texas Health Department and ensures that Sacrament isn’t sued. But it also acts as a deterrent for those whose minds aren’t made up. Webster says he can often tell how serious someone is about getting a tattoo based on how they approach him. “If I ask them what they have in mind and they actually have an idea, typically then it’s easy to tell ‘cause it’s clear they’ve thought about it beforehand.” Of the dozens of people who walk in, a fraction end up going through with it. Says Webster: “‘We’ll be back’ is a nice way of saying they’re not coming back.”
If they end up agreeing on the price and providing their ID, customers are paired with the next available tattoo artist. Other than Barthelemy and Aragon, Sacrament has three resident artists on staff: Bobby Joe Ortiz, a Meadow native with long, dark hair nearly down to his waist; Jacob Barthelemy, 22, Barry’s son and apprentice for three years, who sports a beard and small tattoos at the corner of each eye; and David Campos, from Uvalde, who goes by Elmo and draws colorful “cholo-crossovers” of iconic TV show and video game characters.
Depending on the night, more than two hundred people might enter the shop looking for tattoos, and almost every design is made on the fly to the customer’s specifications. Say someone wants a tattoo of a bird: there’s a bookcase full of reference books to ensure the anatomy is correct, but the design itself is drawn and printed in the back with the help of a table light and a thermal fax machine, which prints with surgical ink and goes directly on the skin. Smaller, more minimal tattoos resembling doodles or penciled sketches—things like arrows, bouquets of flowers, infinity signs, or an outline of Texas—are particularly trendy in the shop at the moment.
Every artist comes from a certain tradition and enjoys working in a specific style, but tattooing, of course, requires collaboration between them and their customers.“You’re not dealing with an opinionless canvas,” Barthelemy says. After all, it’s permanent.
This story has been updated to correct the hometown of tattoo artist David Campos. He’s from Uvalde, not Odessa.
Sixth Street doesn’t look like what you’d expect until around 9 p.m., when police close it off to cars. Sacrament Tattoo sits between the bars and the food trucks—prime real estate to attract those who’ve had their fun dancing and are ready to slow down.
Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith
El Pasoan Chris “Drts” Aragon got his first tattoo in his mother’s kitchen at age thirteen, from a friend of his then-stepfather. He thought it would be funny to get “Lady Killer,” written in Arabic, on his bicep. Years later, when he worked at a Syrian-owned Italian restaurant, his bosses balked at the sight of it. He cringed and agreed. “I was young; it was supposed to be a joke,” he explained. “No,” they said, “that doesn’t mean what you think it means.” Aragon then discovered that the tattoo read more like “Lady Murderer.” He promptly covered it up.
Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith
When Savannah Gibson walked into the shop asking to have “Mad Mechanical Bill” tattooed on her arm, Barry Barthelemy found himself caught in a balancing act. Gibson had the original sketch, done by her brother-in-law, and had gone back and forth over the past fifteen years about getting the tattoo. The tattoo had to do the sketch justice; Barthelemy had to alter the design to make it work but remain true enough to the original to keep Gibson satisfied. There’s no way to erase a line once it's been tattooed; ink on—or, more accurately, under—the skin is a fickle medium because of its tendency to blow out and fade, losing detail with time.
Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith
Every station is decorated with drawings the artist is particularly proud of or planning to tattoo sometime soon. When the shop is quiet, artists sit at their stations with a tablet or a sketchbook and brainstorm. Bobby Joe Ortiz said there’s a form of friendly competition when everyone sits down to draw. “It takes one person busting their ass for everyone to bust their ass.” When he sees Jacob Barthelemy sitting and working on a flash sheet, he thinks to himself, “Well s—t, we should do that too.”
Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith
Barry Barthelemy approaches tattooing from several perspectives. First and foremost, he’s a technician. He used to solder his own tattoo needles back in New Orleans, where he got his start. “It’s a misconception that a tattoo needle is a single needle,” he says. A tattoo needle is actually a grouping of superfine needles, like paintbrushes, which come clumped in rounds or spread like a flat-head screwdriver in mags (short for magnums). Knowing which type of needle to use is half the battle. He’s passed on his unique blend of decision-making and technique to his son. “[Barry] was never hard on me just to be hard on me,” Jacob Barthelemy says, “but he was very stern about doing things right.” Initially, Barry said he wouldn’t apprentice Jacob: “I said, ‘Go get a normal job so you can appreciate this when you have it.’ I had more success getting him to do what I wanted to do here than at home.”
Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith
There are two main types of tattoo machines: rotaries and single-coils. Rotary machines are exactly what they sound like—a motor that rotates, pushing the needle up and down in the process. Single coil machines are a bit more complex; they require an electromagnetic current. The circuit breaks each time the machine pushes the needle down and into the skin. But the second it breaks, the lack of electricity shoots the needle back up, reconnecting the circuit and shooting the needle back down again. These are the “hot rods” of the tattoo world, according to Barry Barthelemy.
Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith
A quarter after midnight, two guys walked in and asked for matching tattoos reading “Gimme Danger.” Barry Barthelemy took one, and David Campos, who goes by the nickname Elmo, took the other. Elmo's first tattoo was a hip-hop-inspired Frankenstein, hands ready to scratch the turntable. He also sports one of his son’s birthday on the bottom of his hand. “When I’m old and senile, I’ll have to remember somehow,” he says.
Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith
Before Chris Aragon sits down to draw, he asks Dalton Webster to massage analgesic balm into his lower back. Aragon blames his back problems on a short stint in the U.S. Air Force, but Barry Barthelemy has another theory. “It’s because he’s sitting down tattooing for more than eight hours a day.”
Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith
When asked what “Gimme Danger” meant, everybody shrugged. Anna, a friend of the customer, admits, “I don’t know why he’s getting this tattoo done, actually.”
Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith
If you want a tattoo but aren’t entirely sure of what, consider the flash wall. These images are designed by artists in-store; they’re well-practiced and come out just as they appear on paper. You can also glean a sense of artists’ particular styles and pair yourself with the one you feel most fit to design what you have in mind.
Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith
Chicano tattoo iconography has its roots in prison stippling with a needle and charcoal. Chris Aragon, who came up in what he calls a “biker and cholo tattoo shop” in El Paso, says that when he’s tattooing something like a scorpion on someone—a symbol for heroin usage—he wonders whether they know what it means. “There [are] people I grew up with who feel possessive about it, calling it cultural appropriation. I call it cultural assimilation,” Aragon says, adding that he doesn't have much room to judge. He says he loves to do traditional Japanese tattoos, and he’s never been to Japan.
