36 CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JULY 2019
CM: There’s so much art on display. Who
did the Andy Warhol portrait?
JB: A local artist, Lori Love. That is all
made from compact discs and vinyl
records. All of the art you see here is by
local artists. All the art is for sale. NoDa
used to be known for gallery crawls, but
now there’s not a lot—the galleries are
gone. So you’re seeing hybrid gallery
spaces like this. People who get tattoos
generally like art. We do art shows with
live music, photography shows, and all
of those are to support NoDa artists,
photographers, and musicians.CM: Matt, you’ve been a tattoo artist for
20 years. What’s changed?
MT: We used to ‘carry ash’ in the old
shops—you had pages of stu to look
through to get ideas for designs. Now
we have the whole Internet. People have
already done all their homework, and
they know what they want before they
get here.CM: What designs are popular now?
MT: People want a lot of compasses now,even though they’ve
never traveled.
JB: And clocks.
MT: It could be a social
thing, like wanting to
leave or worried about
time le. There could
be some sort of under-
lying psychic reser-
voir for why this is so
popular, because you
do see it a lot.
JB: In the last 18 months, we’ve all seen
a lot of minimalist ne artwork. Very
thin ne lines, no coloring, no shading,
just really delicate.
MT: And fully rendered paintings. The
watercolor look is popular.CM: What parts of the body do people
want tattooed?
MT: The people who are getting their
rst few tattoos want them in less visible
locations. “I’m going to keep it under my
polo shirt line.” Most people who can
aord to come in and get stages of tattoo
art are in a job where they can’t neces-sarily show them o. But even that’s
decreasing.CM: Is it true that tattoos are addictive?
MT: I don’t think they’re necessarily
addictive. You take this hurdle to do
something that you cannot alter, that’s
permanent. You do it once, and you go,
‘Oh, I could do that again.’ And you do it
again, and you say, ‘I wish I’d gotten the
rst one bigger.’ And so you start making
these changes.LAURIE PRINCE is a freelance writer and editor
in Charlotte. A former Charlotte magazine edi-
tor, she has won national and regional awards
for her essays.Baker calls Canvas
Tattoo a hybrid
gallery space for the
artwork they display.THE GOOD LIFE
LOGAN CYRUS