.Body ink shops revolutionize artist labor

Four people roll themselves into the frame of a Zoom call, each with their own distinct look. Starting from the left, Piña is all color, from their bright, giving-’80s-vintage jacket to the neon streak in their hair. Next to them, Charm also rocks two-tone hair and brings along Sly, a two-tone dog. Down the line, Joe projects a kind of noir energy with her dark hair and dark sweater. And on Joe’s right, at the laptop’s helm, sits Billie Vale, neck tattoo peeking out of a shirt collar, nose ring front and center.

These are four of the five co-owners of the collective behind Dollhouse Tattoo. The fifth, Maya, was away at the time. They’re gathered for our interview after the team’s weekly Monday check-in, when everyone meets to have candid conversations about how five people can run one cooperative tattoo studio, cooperatively.

As will happen multiple times throughout the call, someone says, “We love each other.” Though I’ve just met them and we’re conversing through the cold filter of technology, I believe them.

In the Bay Area, only Dollhouse and Thorns, another tattoo studio in Berkeley, proclaim themselves as artist-owned. The idea is unconventional and the practice uncommon in an industry built on tradition. For these collective co-owners, that is exactly the point.

Changing the Power Dynamic

“Traditionally in the tattoo community, shops are owned by one person and then all the artists pay, like usually half of their income to the shop owner,” says Billie Vale from Dollhouse. “So us all being artists, we were like, no, we’re not going to do it that way. We’re just going to all have equal ownership of the space, have equal responsibility, pay the same amount.”

All five of the artists opened Dollhouse together in August 2022. In 2019, Rex Larre Campuzano and Sophia Blum shared a similar realization about the mismatch between the time, effort and money they were funneling into someone else’s studio. They left to open Thorns Tattoo.

“We were the workers, we were the artists, we were the people ordering our own supplies, paying the rent, making all of our own publicity,” Larre Campuzano says. “We were basically the people running the studio, but we had no decision-making power.”

Thorns has since expanded to four co-owners. They include Maren Preston and Faride Bustamante, who was considering quitting the industry altogether when Thorns provided a “soft place to land” and took them on as a guest artist.

“As soon as I began, I felt like I had arrived at a place that had really restored hope for me,” said Bustamante, who officially became a co-owner in 2022. “Environments of other tattoo shops had really disillusioned me with how to bring forth stability for myself.”

Others share experiences that run the gamut from feeling overworked and unsupported—“I wasn’t allowed to talk about my feelings at the place I worked for,” Charm at Dollhouse shares—to being blatantly sexually harassed, as Larre Campuzano was while starting out as a tattoo artist in Mexico. The word “exploitative” came up again and again during my interviews. At the center of these issues, say the artists, lies the power dynamic of a single person overseeing the direction of a shop or even, in the common apprenticeship training model, an artist’s career.

Hear what’s playing at Dollhouse and Thorns with our exclusive, artist-made playlist. 

People Over Profits

Piña, one of the self-proclaimed “elders” of the Dollhouse crew, has nine years of experience tattooing, including helping run a previous shop with Billie Vale. After working at Dollhouse, they can’t see themselves going back to a traditional shop—and they don’t measure Dollhouse like one.

“I would say that we’ve been very successful based off the experiences that other artists have had here,” they say. “A majority of our clients tell us that they feel really safe, that it’s a very welcoming space and it’s not like most tattoo shops.”

That welcoming energy extends to the artists at Dollhouse, too. The space is queer-run. Everyone on the call identified as neurodivergent. The guest artists they bring in vary wildly in style and are often, according to Piña. Being different is not only a point of pride for the Dollhouse crew, but also central to how they operate. Their contract of ownership reflects what they didn’t want to carry over from past experiences.

The co-owners of Thorns have an equally distinct measure of success. “All we’re trying to do is live good lives,” Larre Campuzano says. And never at the expense of each other.

Thorns operates around the dreams and desires of its artists. When they discovered how many people on the team wanted to travel, they hired a part-time studio manager to help keep the space running. Artists also offer sliding-scale pricing for BIPOC individuals. Co-owners manage their own profits and decide their own responsibilities.

“We run a terrible business,” Larre Campuzano says. “But it’s great for the workers.” 

Not terrible as in unsuccessful or unsustainable. Simply unconventional. Both Larre Campuzano and Bustamante see their model as revolutionary, an example of what the world could like like “if workers actually had control over their labor.”

The Work of Making It Work

Running a collective isn’t all sunshine and inked roses, and it’s certainly not effortless.

“Get ready. Buckle up,” Piña advises anyone considering the cooperative business model. Billie Vale counters with a more serious note: “Find people you can be really open and honest with—who you can communicate with early and often.”

The Dollhouse co-owners emphasize how they talk constantly, in their regular check-ins and in an ongoing group chat. They try to give each other grace in these conversations. And it helped them to have a contract in place before they opened the shop that spelled out contingency plans and established how they wanted to run their space. That allowed them to figure out the day-to-day logistics, like establishing their weekly check-ins and scheduling “deep clean days” at the studio.

Thorns offers similar guidance. “We just have this culture of being extremely honest with each other—both for what’s working and for what’s not working out. Making agreements on paper is so important,” Larre Campuzano says, adding that the team has “hella documents.”

Thorns also looked to other businesses built around collective models to gain inspiration for theirs, citing Cheese Board Collective Pizzeria, Arizmendi Bakery, and Nick’s Pizza and Bakery as examples. They recommend the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives as a resource to others looking to increase workplace democracy or form a cooperative.

Yet trial and error still informed their decisions on how to best operate Thorns. When the studio initially opened, Thorns’ two co-owners wanted to bring more people into the co-ownership model right away. It quickly became clear that wasn’t the right approach. Not everyone wanted the commitment, nor was everyone the right fit. Now, prospective co-owners go through a six-month trial period, as Bustamante did when they came into their role. And today, the whole team, not just co-owners, embark on a yearly retreat centered around visioning exercises of what people want and what the studio can be.

Nearly 40 minutes into the call with Dollhouse, Billie Vale punctuates an answer to me with a “Love you guys” to the team. The sentiment reverberates around the art-filled, candy-colored walls of a studio aptly named.

“I just really like dollhouses,” Charm says when I ask about the origin story. That, too, is the spirit of the space. In a dollhouse, it is enough to want something, to believe in something and then to bring it into being—to build the rooms where everyone belongs.

Dollhouse Tattoo; open by appointment; 1624 University Ave., Berkeley. instagram.com/dollhouse.tattoo

Thorns Tattoo; by appointment; 2447 Sacramento St., Berkeley. thornstattoo.com