[TATTOO GUN BUZZING]
DAN SANTORO: I did a gecko and I started shading outside of
it because I did the line work.
And then I jumped onto the shader.
And I had lime green.
And let's say this is the gecko.
I wasn't looking and I just went like this.
And just the way I was stretching, I thought this was
inside the gecko.
So I just started whip-shading lime green.
And then I pulled my hand away and there was this giant green
whip shade marks.
And they guy didn't see it, though.
So I was like, yo, man.
You know what would look real cool?
If this thing was sitting on some leaves.
And he was like, yeah.
I was like, I'm not going to charge you, man.
He's like, yeah, I'd love some leaves.
So I just put a big leaf there.
BERT KRAK: Dan has a very distinct style that, usually,
when you see it, you can tell it's his own.
Dan's approach is just different.
And it's unique.
We're all special.
Dan's just a little extra special, you know?
He's into, obviously, tattooing, music--
DAN SANTORO: The new Inquisition record.
This is the shit, right here.
BERT KRAK: He's into painting.
And that's with brushes or aerosol.
He's also into collecting and antiquing.
Oh, he's extremely well-rounded.
DAN SANTORO: It's confusing.
It's a cultural identity issue.
I'm almost overly exposed to things.
I have so many friends that are into so
much interesting stuff.
And I've manage to find merit in almost everything.
Luckily, I've really kind of cultivated what I like the
most about things that I like.
And I've kind of made it work.
The shop I work at now is Smith Street Tattoo Parlour.
STEVE BOLTZ: There's four of us working at
Smith Street Tattoo.
It's me, Bert Krak, Eli Quinters, and Dan Santoro.
Me, Eli, and Bert opened the place sort of together, and
then Dan joined us about a year later.
But Dan was always in the plan.
Dan was like our fourth guy.
DAN SANTORO: I was at Adorned.
And at the time that Smith Street was even a twinkle in
any of their eyes, I was around a lot.
I was spending a lot of time at Steve's.
A lot of nights, get off work, hop on the train, go over to
Steve's, have a couple cold boys, some painting.
So around that time, Steve had mentioned something that he
was walking his dog in the neighborhood and he saw this
storefront that looked like it had been vacant for some time.
And how he thought it was a really cool block, right by
the train, and all this stuff like that.
And he said he was going to look into it.
I was scared to say yes at first.
I didn't know Smith Street was going to be as
amazing as it is.
I mean, I should have known.
But I didn't.
And I thought about it for like a week.
And then I was like, you know what?
I'm just going to do it.
I'm pretty impulsive and whatever.
So I'm just going to do it.
It's just one of those things where the planets aligned for
Smith Street.
We were all friends.
Dream situation for me, working with these guys.
BERT KRAK: This is 100% our clubhouse.
I never feel, driving here from Queens, like
I'm going to work.
I always feel like I'm coming here to hang out with my
friends and have a good time.
DAN SANTORO: I think Eli's closer to Steve.
And me and Bert, I think, might be a little similar.
We exchanged birthday tattoos.
We have the same birthday.
So we actually did little Cancer crabs on each other on
one of our birthdays.
Bert absolutely loves the fact that we're
born on the same day.
He brings up about once a week.
BERT KRAK: I was born July 12, '77.
I believe he's July 12, '83.
I'm very much a Cancer.
So is he.
You know, hard on the outside, soft on the inside.
We're both really sensitive.
It wouldn't take much to really ruffle our feathers.
No, there was already graffiti, dude.
DAN SANTORO: Of course, but yo-- but there's not already
tags all over the fucking walls in here.
All right, we're not having a fucking moral
conversation right now.
It's the dumbest shit ever.
STEVE BOLTZ: Before Dan came on, I was kind
of the loose cannon.
Because I'm a little bit messy.
I definitely can be a loud mouth.
And, maybe in a different way, Dan's now the loose cannon.
He's just a pathological thinker, you know?
DAN SANTORO: I don't know.
It's like when you go to Walmart and you see the old
lady with the puffy, pink, patch sweatshirt.
You know the feeling you get?
That's how I feel sometimes when people bring certain
tattoos in.
I really want to give it to them.
And I want to make it really good.
All right.
So I get a phone call.
And this woman's like, we have this woman.
She wants to get tattooed.
I think she got--
I think it was Charlie Brown, if I'm not mistaken.
And she's going like, aargh.
And she's shaking her leg.
Within three lines, the tattoo is so fucked.
So I was just like--
dude.
It was like being on a ride.
I was just like.
And I did it.
ELI QUINTERS: Nothing's ever set in stone with Santoro.
Dan seems to be definitely the least
organized out of everybody.
STEVE BOLTZ: Dan also has the same mentality, as far as
that's our job and making tattoos.
But Dan just does everything by the seat of his pants.
And I think that the whole seat-of-the-pants or
unpreparedness or whatever, I think he subconsciously is
that way on purpose.
The way he tattoos, there's a lot of confidence.
And even very simple, clunky tattoos just look so good.
ELI QUINTERS: He's one of my favorites, for sure.
It's traditional, real
stripped-down, real bare bones.
I would say he's a little looser than maybe I am.
I really try to do a very exact line and everything.
And he recently moved me away from that.
He's made me loosen up a lot.
I think he's kind of got a lot of what Dan Higgs had in that
he knows just how to put down a line and just do the tattoo.
And it comes out--
I don't know.
It looks great.
He can make something look pretty and delicate and all
those things, but they still have that
Santoro look to them.
BERT KRAK: Me and Dan, we do a lot of really
kind of bold tattooing.
But it doesn't mean that Eli and Steve
can't do the same thing.
We're a team.
DAN SANTORO: Almost every tattoo that gets done, good or
bad, we show off to each other.
I think that's a really good thing.
I've worked in shops where I couldn't even tell you the
last tattoo I saw of an artist for months.
You know what I mean?
You just kind of work in your little corner of the shop,
finish a tattoo, put a bandage on it, see you later.
There's no fun in that.
I mean, I want to see it.
I want to see what you're doing.
I want to see if you did something that maybe I
should've been thinking about.
We bite the hell out of each other, but it's cool.
We work together.
That's why we're there.
FERGUS SIMMS: These guys are just doing the best of the
tattoos around, in my opinion.
It's the best shop in the world by far, for the style
especially.
We've been planning this trip for a while
from Melbourne, Australia.
I don't know.
We saved up for six, seven months or so, and then bought
tickets and came.
We haven't done too much tourist stuff yet.
We've just kind of been sitting in the shop.
I think we're up to 11 now, and then got a
couple more on Tuesday.
So this one's from Steve.
And from Dan.
This one's from Dan as well-- cool little cat.
Got the dagger skull from Dan and little crying hema heart
from Dan as well.
And that one's from Steve.
STEVE BOLTZ: It's just like a kind of a special thing at
Smith Street because we all do anything, but we all basically
do the same thing, too.
And people don't necessarily ask or say, that looks like a
Steve Boltz tattoo or a Bert Krak tattoo so much anymore as
they might say, that looks like a Smith Street tattoo.
And I hear that and I love it.
If you come to the shop and I'm not there, you're not
afraid to sit in Dan's chair or Eli's chair because you
know that you're going to get basically the same product.
We very consciously want our tattoos to look a certain way.
And New York is part of that.
New York's a very
straightforward approach to living.
There's no fucking around.
And I think in tattooing, maybe there's a similar thing
whereas it's a very straightforward look to
tattoos as opposed to it being fancier or more artistic.
Hey, we want our tattoos to look classic.
We don't want them to look dated.
And when somebody comes and wants an owl on their chest,
it's like, why don't you just get a fucking
eagle on your chest?
Why do you got to get an owl?
The technical application is what will make a
tattoo slick, to me.
It's a good thing to just be able to give somebody a nice
solid, clean, predictable tattoo.
That's a good thing.
And even if it's a tattoo that 50 people have, its new and
it's original because you have to put your hand to it.
ELI QUINTERS: We're all really going for the tattoo style.
We want our tattoos to look like tattoos.
When you're a little kid and you think about what a tattoo
is, the first thing for myself and I think a lot of people
that popped into their head are the anchors like Popeye
had, or even a Mom heart or something like that.
Just something that would almost be represented in a
cartoon, so to speak.
What you picture in your head when somebody says the word
"tattoo" is usually some sort of tattoo imagery, not some
no-outline, color portrait thing.
You know what I mean?
So, I mean, I think that's probably
unifying in that terms.
We use a bold outline and a lot of black shading.
We have a lot of the same reference material.
Tattooing is an art and its form is this traditional,
almost sailor-style tattooing.
DAN SANTORO: I guess maybe I started tattooing late enough.
There was still enough going on with people wanting to do
traditional stuff that I was like, OK.
I know I want my tattoos to look like that, but how?
And then I was finding the Dan Higgs tattoos that were in
"Tattoo Time."
"Tattoo Time" was a publication that Ed Hardy put
of from early '80s probably to the early '90s that had the
weirdo art section.
And they were just really strange tattoos, but they
still had that traditional application that I was looking
for in anything, really.
I'd see tattoos and not really know why I liked them.
But I knew I just liked them.
And then I'd realize down the road, oh, it's
because they're bold.
And they're simple.
[JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING]