It’s a Friday afternoon at Brightside Tattoo on Dimond Boulevard and Jin Chong is busy tattooing a client. He’s working on a Korean-inspired tiger with ornamental butterfly wings.
To Chong’s knowledge, he is the first and only Korean tattoo artist in Alaska. It’s an opportunity for him to connect with people in his community.
“Truthfully, I don’t have that many Korean friends so it’s a cool opportunity for us to meet,” Chong said. “I feel like Korean art isn’t really prevalent in Anchorage either, so I’m just trying to do my part.”
Chong, 29, is part of a growing trend of young artists entering the tattooing industry. In 2019, Senate Bill 4 split the tattooist and permanent cosmetic colorists into two separate license types instead of the original combined license.
As of March 2023, there are 214 active licensed tattoo artists in Alaska, with 39 active tattoo apprentices.
According to the Alaska Board of Barbers & Hairdressers, from 2017 to 2019 the board issued “an average of 10-15 new licenses a calendar year” but has “seen a steady increase in issued licenses beginning June 30, 2021.”
Chong, who began apprenticing under veteran tattoo artist Laura Craver in 2021, received his State of Alaska license in August 2022.
Craver worked at Primal Instinct Tattoo for six years before opening her own South Anchorage shop, Brightside Tattoo, in September 2022. Three artists who previously worked with her at Primal Instinct — Ariel Akerlund, Bear Lawrence and Chong — joined her when she founded her new shop.
A similar shift happened within other Anchorage tattoo shops last year. In May 2022, five individual tattoo artists, as well as Gold Fox Piercing, announced they were leaving Ultraviolence Tattoo. All are currently working under the same roof, but in private studio spaces.
Brie Sladen worked at various shops in town before founding Black Heart Club Tattoo in downtown Anchorage in early 2022 alongside Viola Armstead and Kevin Taylor. The three artists previously worked together at another Anchorage shop. Sladen, who has been in the tattoo community for decades including tattooing for over 14 years, is “very fucking proud” of her shop and crew. She has been tattooing in Anchorage since 2008.
“I love what we have scheduled for the years to come,” Sladen said. “I love the approach that we are taking on the tattoo community.”
Black Heart Club Tattoo had to be completely renovated before move-in.
“We had to redo everything. We ripped down all the ceilings, replaced the ceilings, we had to redo all of the flooring,” she said. “We didn’t even have drywall on the fucking walls, we had to put up drywall. We didn’t have any plumbing, we had no hot water in the whole thing. So we learned a lot through the process… it was like, round the clock shit.”
Both Brightside and Black Heart Club have cultivated a clientele base that loves flash: pre-drawn designs for clients to choose between when they enter a shop.
Since opening, Brightside has hosted two flash days: a Halloween flash day that had 53 people lined up outside the building and A Very Twilight Valentines Flash Day — featuring flash designs inspired by the Twilight movie series.
Flash days are a blur.
“My first flash day compared to my second flash day went by a lot smoother, just cause repetition — I know what’s coming,” he said.
Last year, with the U.S. Supreme Court voting to overturn Roe vs. Wade, Black Heart Club hosted Bodily Autonomy Flash Day, with over a dozen flash pieces to choose from on the Fourth of July. Sladen, along with Armstead and Akerlund of Brightside Tattoo, tattooed folks from noon until midnight, and ended up raising nearly $2,000 for Planned Parenthood Alaska.
“We also ended up having the director of all of the Planned Parenthoods here for Alaska come down from Fairbanks and end up getting tattooed later on in the week,” Sladen said. “I had one day where three people actually from Planned Parenthood came in and I got to tattoo all of them. So that was a really, really special experience.”
Sladen is excited to continue flash days in the future, including a 420 flash sheet with cannabis-inspired designs featuring her friend and fellow tattoo artist, Will White.
“I’m stoked to do more, because truly, the energy that it did bring was magic,” she said.
Sam Davenport is a writer residing in Anchorage. She's a leo and a plant-person, and loves spending quality time with her dog, Aspen. She is a Real Housewives fan and has been called a Bravo historian.