King Ink
Tattoos are everywhere. But the tattoo business has yet to outgrow its outlaw roots. Mario Barth aims to change that. His goal: to build the Starbucks of tattoo parlors.
Brian Finke
Mario Barth Owner of Starlight Tattoo
Brian Finke
Under the Needle Barth inks a rosary on the chest of rapper Jim Jones. He comes in every 10 days for more.
Brian Finke
Tools of the Trade Barth sells $3.8 million of tattoo ink a year. He’s known for his deep blues.
Mario Barth hunches forward in his swivel chair, staring intently at the bicep of a New York Giants lineman named David Diehl. His left hand pulls the man's skin taut, while his right dabs at it with a machine that looks and sounds like a dentist's drill. The dark ink spreads on thick and smooth. Unseen, 15 tiny needles penetrate Diehl's flesh at a rate of 12 times a second. Every half minute or so, Barth wipes off the excess ink with a big piece of gauze and smears petroleum jelly over the area. He then rotates toward a table, wraps a new piece of gauze around his left pinky, takes a dollop of petroleum jelly on his index finger, and once again attacks the man's arm. This goes on for five hours, give or take a few short breaks during which Barth checks his BlackBerry and Diehl checks out the work in a full-length mirror. When it's all over, the 319-pound client is visibly pleased with his new tattoo: a ship's anchor flanked by swallows. "I'll never go to anyone else," he says.
Whatever squeamishness you might have about tattoos, it's difficult to watch this process without feeling moved by the art. A freehand tattoo--that is, one drawn without stencils--is like a live jazz recording, preserving the artist's improvised triumphs and inevitable compromises. Barth describes the craft as spiritually exhilarating. "It's almost like a drug," he says, speaking with just a touch of an Austrian accent. "You're working on somebody for hours, penetrating their skin, hearing their closest stories. The aura is crazy."
A tattoo from Barth, no matter how simple, costs at least $1,500. Most clients wind up paying much, much more. That kind of money has made Barth a rich man. He owns a Lamborghini Gallardo, a 7-Series BMW, a fully restored 1952 Buick Super 8, and a chain of four tattoo shops in northern New Jersey. In the world of tattooing, that makes Barth a mogul. But he wants something more. His BlackBerry is buzzing because Barth is on the verge of something big, that one deal that can change everything. Even as he inks the burly lineman, his thoughts are in Las Vegas, where he hopes to transform his little chain into something else: a household name. If he succeeds, he'll bring business practices that have been commonplace in most companies since the industrial revolution into an industry that often forgets it is one. Barth is ungodly nervous--afraid to even bring up the deal for fear of jinxing it--and rightly so. Nothing this ambitious has been tried in tattooing.
Getting a tattoo once was an act of rebellion. But when an 18-year-old gets inked today, chances are he is motivated as much by the need to conform as the urge to rebel. Walk around an American shopping mall, and you'll see jocks with barbed wire around their biceps and cheerleaders with Chinese characters on their lower backs. Women piloting strollers sport elaborate flowers on their shoulder blades; Harley-Davidson logos--the most commonly tattooed brand--peek out from under the polo shirts of mild-mannered men. A tattoo won't get you kicked out of a restaurant and it won't hurt your chances of landing a job. According to the Pew Research Center, 36 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds are inked, compared with only 10 percent of their parents' generation. (In 1936, Life magazine estimated that 6 percent of the population had gone under the needle.)
No one knows how big the industry is, but estimates have put the number of tattoo shops somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000. If each of those shops employs a single artist who works 30 hours a week, charging the relatively low price of $100 an hour, tattooing in America is a $2.3 billion business. Yet somehow, entrepreneurs--so adept at capitalizing on countercultural phenomena like hip-hop music and skateboarding--haven't figured out how to play the trend. Twenty years after tattoos truly began to enter the mainstream, the industry remains as fragmented and fiercely anticorporate as ever.
Barth's efforts to change this would seem entirely foolhardy were it not for his reputation as a tattooist. There are perhaps less than 50 others who charge similarly high rates and command such long waiting lists. (Barth's is a year and a half.) Today, Barth is the artist of choice for rock stars--including Lenny Kravitz, Ja Rule, and members of My Chemical Romance--as well as athletes such as Diehl and Jason Kidd. But Barth wants to be more than an artist. Two years ago, he embarked on an ambitious company expansion. He is now the only tattoo artist with studios on both sides of the Atlantic and is one of the largest domestic producers of tattoo ink. Starlight Tattoo and its ancillary businesses employ 30 people and generate $7 million in revenue a year, with an annual growth rate of more than 150 percent.
Now Barth is doubling down, planning an ambitious new studio in Las Vegas that aims squarely at the white-collar mainstream. The new Starlight Tattoo will be located in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, one of the world's largest hotels and winner of the Meeting News Planner's Choice award for three of the past four years. It will be the fanciest tattoo parlor ever built--and Barth says it's only the beginning. He envisions shops in every major world city--Tokyo, Beijing, Milan, Barcelona, Berlin, Los Angeles, and more. The shops will be what Starbucks is to coffee: pleasant, reliable, and ubiquitous. They'll boast world-class artists--many of whom now travel to Barth's New Jersey locations as guests--and they'll be run by the people Barth has spent the past few years training. When he's really dreaming, Barth imagines a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars and a tattoo industry that has been fully redeemed as the prodigal son of the business community.
If entrepreneurial ambition was late in coming for the 41-year-old Barth, his ability as an artist seems to date from the womb. Tattooists often talk about having received their calling at a very young age, sketching dragons on their arms while the other kids did their math homework, and Barth is no exception. He executed his first tattoo at age 12--poking a black skull onto the back of a friend's hand using a sewing needle and India ink. His parents wouldn't let him near a needle for the next five years, but Barth was hooked. At 17, he began tattooing friends, and at 23 he opened a shop in his hometown of Graz, Austria, the first legal tattoo studio in the country since World War II.
