KMUW | By Celia Hack
PublishedMay 17, 2024 at 5:00 AM CDT
At the Por Vida tattoo shop in Delano, Giana Martinez prepares to add ink to a strawberry plant she’s drawn in marker on her customer’s upper arm.
“My style is single-needle, black and gray,” Martinez said. “So, I use a very small needle for the whole tattoo. And that comes from my culture, Chicano culture.
“I'm the only Chicana artist in Wichita that specializes in fine line tattoos, specifically Chicana-style tattoos.”
Her arms overflow with examples: full portraits of her grandma, her grandpa, a pair of hands clasping a rosary, roses. Almost all are done entirely in black and shades of gray.
Martinez owns Por Vida Ink with her husband, Cesar Martinez. Both will take walk-ins at Wichita’s tattoo fair this weekend – the RiverCity Tattoo and Lifestyle Expo at Century II.
“It is very important for us to be there and for the city to have it,” Giana Martinez said. “... Being Chicano artists, it is important to show up and represent for our culture and our style of tattooing.”
Celia Hack
/
KMUW
About 60 artists from across the state will offer live tattooing at the expo, on top of the cosmetologists, barbers and body piercers who will be present. The event is also bringing in some big name tattoo artists to judge competitions, including a tattoo reality TV star.
Tattooing, once stigmatized, is now seen by many as an art form. In Wichita, tattoo proponents see the expo as a venue to professionalize body art, foster enthusiasm for ink and do good business.
Leaders at City Hall seem to agree that the unprecedented event is an economic growth and development opportunity.
“It's a couple of days worth of … events,” said Vice Mayor Maggie Ballard. “So, people will likely be staying at hotels, eating in our restaurants, going to some of the bars, hanging out. … And so it's just hopefully going to bring a lot of new faces to Wichita.”
Bryan Parsons is the tattoo artist organizing the event. He’s wanted to see an expo in Kansas for at least a decade, as he traveled throughout the country to other tattoo conventions.
But he said the state’s regulations, on top of Wichita’s zoning rules, made it tough.
“Pretty much every state is able to do so,” Parsons said. “Kansas is one of the very few that … could never do it. And we're hungry to do pretty much the same thing that all these other states do.”
To make the expo happen this year, Parsons and his co-organizer Steve Roseberry said they worked closely with the state’s Board of Cosmetology and the city of Wichita. The state is sending several inspectors to the event this weekend, and each tattoo artist will have to have a Kansas license to participate.
Celia Hack
/
KMUW
The City Council even voted to change Century II’s zoning in January to ensure tattooing – and the event – could take place. The council also changed its rules last fall to allow tattooing in Old Town.
“I was really pleased that they brought it to our attention that, ‘Hey, this is something that's really outdated, and it's a huge missed opportunity for the downtown area,’” Ballard said.
The expo gives some legitimacy to an art form that’s long been looked at as unseemly, Roseberry said.
“It's not the tattooing of the past,” Roseberry said. “It is really a respectable, professional industry at this point.”
For Parsons, the expo is also a place to learn from other tattoo artists and gain inspiration.
“We have people of all, you know, cultures, genders, religions. Tattooing’s a melting pot,” he said.
“We have watercolor artists, there's artists doing realism, black and gray. There's just so many directions that it goes in and my mind is blown.”
Roseberry says they’ve sold between 500 and 600 tickets so far. Attendees are already planning the tattoos they want.
Kyler Winn, who bought tickets, is looking for a memorial tattoo for a friend who passed away. It’ll go alongside several he already has in remembrance of family and friends.
“It's just something that I can use as like a memory,” Winn said. “… It's like an engraving for me so I can remember a lot of stuff, especially my past traumas and heartaches.”
Celia Hack
/
KMUW
