Ancient art form gets a new home on Bainbridge

Published 12:46 pm Thursday, September 11, 2014

Tattooing as an art form has a long and interesting history throughout countless cultures and numerous regions around the world.

Maybe not on Bainbridge Island, but lots of other places. Honest.

That, however, may not be the case much longer as one enterprising island artist has set about establishing a homegrown body art culture through the first-ever legitimate tattoo parlor on Bainbridge Island. Her name is Tracy Lang, and she is the owner, operator and head designer at Ryderville Ink, located on Madison Avenue North.

Lang said that the initial public reaction to her shop, which entered its second year of operation in May, was a mixed bag of immediate enthusiasm and outright surprise.

“A lot of people were like, ‘They’re going to let you open a tattoo parlor on Bainbridge?’ And it’s just a very interesting psychology,” Lang remembered.

“I’m like, ‘They will let me?’ Me, I’m just like, ‘Of course they’re going to let me!’ People are like, ‘I can’t believe that happened,’ As if our culture doesn’t allow it or something.”

“That to me was a signal that Bainbridge is ready,” Lang said. “Because there were enough people that are mystified by it, but also there’s nothing different about Bainbridge than anywhere else.”

“There’s this concept that we’re somehow aberrant than the rest of the communities in the world and it’s just not true. I mean, 50 percent of everyone here has a tattoo, too. They just go get them in the city or in Silverdale.”

Lang, who is originally from Oregon and moved to Bainbridge in 2001, is a well-established artist in the region and was recently the focus of a solo exhibition at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. “Tsunami Papers,” featured Lang’s mural-sized collages printed with woodcuts and melded with disparate shreds of various fabrics and papers woven together to create emotional storyboards about the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan.

She works in photography, fabric, wood etchings and various paints, but said she has always had a love of tattoo art, and a focus on the human form, which eventually drew her to combine her passions.

“I started with watercolor and lettering when I was 12,” Lang said. “My aunt is a professional watercolorist, and I was her 12-year-old model, and she learned how to draw the figure from me and it turned into her teaching me how to do water colors.”

Lang studied at several schools, but said she is primarily a self-taught artist and a completely self-taught tattoo artist.

“I grew up in it,” she explained. “My uncle, who lived really close, was a biker tattoo artist and he did it all at home. It was back in the ‘70s when everyone made their own stuff, so I got to watch a lot of that. I was not allowed too close, but I managed to make my presence known.”

From that early interest and a life-long study of the human form, Lang said she eventually worked up the courage to put needle to skin.

“I never really did it in my early life because I felt like I really didn’t want to make a mistake on anybody,” she laughed. “I felt like I had to be a good artist before I could do it. So I went out made myself into a great artist before I even began.”

She did eventually take the plunge into her new medium, using herself and her own skin at first to get the technique right.

Lang’s style is miles away from the rough-and-tumble biker tats she saw as a child. Her tattoo work is, much like the rest of her work, inspired by the natural world and spiritual in origin.

“I’m a fine art food gardener too,” Lang explained, using a metaphor to describe her tattooing process. “So I have a lot of people in the community who have been using me for years and years in all these different fine art realms, three-dimensional realms. Then to move to tattoos, it’s still three-dimensional. It’s not gardening per se, but it’s still the same kind of thing [except] you’re cultivating something on a person. The tattoo and the human and you are all in synch together. It has to be for it to work.”

Lang said she sees approximately 20 customers a month. Her clientele is very diverse, she said, and includes both eager teens and long-time adult holdouts searching for their first tattoo and veteran ink-bearers looking for something new.

“People who know me get tattoos from me,” Lang said. “People in the art world get tattoos from me. I’m like the artist that artists come to, to get the work that they’ve always wanted. The thing about the tattoo world is it’s kind of homogenized. There’s like ‘genres.’ You’ve got the pin-up girl style and the rocker style, the 3-D flash, and although I think I could pull that off if somebody asked, what I’m looking for is people who are looking for somebody that they’re not going to get it anywhere else. I’ve been through so many different styles of art, just in my art world, that I’m able to translate pretty much anything.”

Lang’s shop has no set business hours, but like the sign on the door says, she is usually close by. To arrange a visit or a consultation, call or text her directly at

206-855-9458 or email langprints@gmail.com.

Ultimately, Land said she enjoys working in the medium of tattoos as it is a far more personal way for her to connect with her subjects, and allows her art to stand for something truly unique for each individual.

“The tattoo thing was a way of getting back to my own culture,” Lang said.

She remembered that during the 2008 economic recession, most people were simply unable to afford to purchase art on a large or commercial scale, despite having the desire to seek out and explore new artists, while tattooing as an art form only grew in popularity and cultural importance. “I needed to go back to my community, because they want art they just want it on their body,” she said.