Will's Sale Extended, Indefinitely

Will ran a sale using the prices he charged when he first opened his shop 12 years ago in honor of his business anniversary. While obviously a great deal, the response was overwhelming and honestly, bittersweet. Even after extending the sale to 44 appointments we had more interest that we could handle and most of the submissions we really cool stuff. It’s kind of a shame that there are people out there with cool ideas who want tattoos and just plain old can’t afford them. These people aren’t broke something-for-nothing’ers either. Good folks who just don’t have the money to pay what Will normally charges. They got bills man.

Everything’s high. Too damn high. Beef and eggs are up, rent is up, gas is way up. Even Walmart has come out and said people aren’t spending as much money as they used to and it’s because they don’t HAVE it to spend. Now, while tattoos are cool and all, you don’t have to get those either, and Will, being in the position he is, has the mot flexibility financially to offer discounts. So he’s decided to extend his sale indefinitely.

The only issue we’ve run into is one of scheduling. Everyone wants to get tattooed on the weekend. So we created a hierarchy of appointments based on availability. We hope you like it and as long as it’s sustainable, Will has dedicated himself to making these tattoos happen for as many people as he can. He has already started booking his days off and taken on additional appointments in order to keep the wait times down, but at this rate, we expect his schedule to fill up rather quickly, so please don’t wait to book something. As of this writing, Will has 1 available day left in September and a couple in October, 7 in November. After that, things open up, but we doubt that will stay the case once this news gets around.

From Will: ‘I appreciate yall for supporting us over the years and now I’m in a position to give back, so I will as long as I can. Be patient with me, and sorry about my face!’

Free Anniversary Tattoo

Will is of the express belief that vampires should be monstrous. One of the best recent depictions of that kind of vampire is none other than Marcus Corvinus from the film Underworld: Evolution. I guess this is also a good time to hock our Halloween on October 17th. Stay tuned to lighthousetattoo.net for more details.

Interested in getting a horror movie tattoo from one of the best artists around? Fill out the ‘Set an Appointment’ tab on this website and we’ll reach back out ASAP!

Free Anniversary Tattoo and Halloween Party Announcement!

When Will decided to give away 12 portraits for his 12th business anniversary, he had no idea he’d end up doing a Batman Who Laughs on a guy that works with Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo! If you don’t know who they are, that’s okay, it’s a comic book nerd thing. Anyway, such good fun doing this great piece and it’s very cool that Scott and Gregg will actually be able to see this great character tattooed on one of their friends. Thanks man!

Additionally, we would like to take this time to officially announce our Annual Halloween Party on October 17th at 7pm. This BYOB costume party will be replete with live entertainment, food, and games. It’s become quite legendary over the years and is open to the public, free of charge (so bring your friends, you don’t have to be a client to attend).

Bring Out Yer Dead!

Monty Python, if you know, you know.

On Saturday, October 17th, Lighthouse Tattoo will be hosting our annual Halloween party. This thing has become the stuff of legends. Booze will be drank; alliances formed; Hell, babies may be made. Last year, a girl set her head on fire! It’s a party, after all.

This is a costume party, replete with costume contests for prizes; it’s BYOB; open to the public (so invite your friends); 18 and up only. There will be food like pizzas and sweets, live entertainment, and a human sacrifice (are you reading this?).

So dress up, and bring friends.

Well, that was Quick!

Will wanted to do something fun for the shop’s anniversary. He picked out a dozen tattoos he’d be willing to do for free and posted them. They were all gobbled up within minutes (with the exception of an MLK portrait that got picked up, then turned down a couple of times, which still kinda sticks in Will’s craw, but we digress…)which is to be expected, considering the price point.

Then, Will got this fun idea to extend that celebration in the form of a tattoo sale. This sale mimicked the prices he started the business with: $300 for a 5-hour session, 2 sessions per day, starting at noon and ending at 10pm. Over the years, you see, Will’s rates had climbed until he was charging $800/ 5 hr session. He’s a busy guy, what can we say? So a callback to those earlier prices seemed fun, especially at a time when the news tells us so many people can’t afford to survive, much less get awesome tatties.

That sale lasted less than a weekend. 12 days, 24 appointments, booked up in less than 3 days. We had no idea times were so tough out there. It seems people have a little money and want tattoos, they just can’t afford to break the bank! Makes sense. And tattoos, like so many other things nowadays, have gotten too damn high.

So Will’s decided to extend his sale. He’s been tattooing for 22 years, so he’s adding 10 days of $300/5 hr sessions. If the last few days have been any indication, these sessions will not last long, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Bill Murray

Comedic icon Bill Murray. For a while there Murray’s portrait as a tattoo was the most prolific celebrity portrait being done, period. Caddyshack, The Ghostbuster’s, Saturday Night Live, Groundhog Day, Kingpin, Garfield, you know all his greats. Bill Murray seems fun and quirky in the best ways. That, coupled with the strangeness of this particular photograph, is why Will chose to include it as one of his 12 free business Anniversary tattoos.

Enough is enough is all about sustainability, about making artwork more accessible to people who could really use something to feel good about at a time when optimism is on such short supply. It’s about seeing some of the problems inherent in unchecked ‘stock market capitalism’ and looking to the past to find the balance between financial viability and serving the purpose for which the business was originally intended.

In the tattoo business, that purpose is making tattoos. There has to be ENOUGH money for the business to stay solvent, for sure, but in order to keep the industry’s head above water, we think it’s time to cut everyone a little slack.

Last year, Lighthouse Tattoo ran an open-ended special. This special was based on what our founder, Will Wood, charged when he opened his first shop in the summer of 2014. He charged $300 for a 5-hour session. Last year, all of our artists EXCEPT WILL participated in this sale. THIS YEAR, to commemorate 12 years in business, for 12 days, Will is going back to his old rate.

Abraham Lincoln

Will wanted to do a portrait of Abraham Lincoln because, well, it’s goddamn Abraham Lincoln! Easy first ballot president Hall of Fame inductee, the man is responsible for the modern American landscape. Courage, integrity, understanding, these words barely scrape the surface of what made ol’ Honest Abe so great.

For 12 days, artist and founder Will Wood is offering 5-hour sessions for his original introductory rate of $300. That’s 24 total sessions, one at noon and one at 5pm, for $300. All in honor of his 12 years in business. Please fill out the ‘set and appointment’ from on this website THOROUGHLY, take your time, and we’ll reach back out to get you on his books. Repeat clients and cool tattoo ideas will take priority and these sessions will absolutely fucking FLY off the shelves, so don’t wait.

Captain Jack Sparrow

Who doesn’t love Jack Sparrow? Not the best guy in the world, but far from the worst. Free-living, rum-loving, living by his wits and sheer luck at times. Ol’ Captain Jack was always willing to take the bad with the good, as long as the reward was worth the risk. Just so he didn’t have to do what he was told.

Tattooing has been much maligned across it’s history. Soldiers and sailors got them while on drunken liberty in various ports of call and the women who got them were not called nice things, generally speaking. Of course, they didn’t really give a fuck, now did they? Those soldiers, back from war and needing something a little more to get the blood pumping turned to motorcycles to get their kicks. A culture of unwritten rules around respect, honor, and booze gave birth to the motorcycle clubs that have been popularized in the movies and television shows people still watch to this day.

And their tattoos came with them.

Searching for a way to fund their counterculture lifestyle, many clubs, bikers, and veterans opened their own shops. Scary, smokey, loud and bawdy, tattoo shops were not for children or sensitive types and the only women that got tattoos damn well didn’t do so on a whim. It’s this air of danger and mystery that intrigued many and scared many others. With that, tattooed people were considered off-limits to squares.

Booze, drugs, sex, and violence. Tattoo shops could be fun if you knew how to carry yourself and what you wanted. But they didn’t exactly scream consumer-friendly. Over the last 30-40 years the business has really managed to fix that image. Most shops are more like boutiques than biker clubhouses now and a much more customer-friendly approach has been widely adopted. Professional tattooers can regularly do guest spots at shops across the country (or even overseas) without changing their business practices by a significant degree and this uniformity has done great things for tattooers and clients. Money began to flow freely.

Then something terrible happened. As the fear of tattooed people and culture subsided due to those television shows’ popularity and shop owners got their hands on some real money, some jackass decided to put tattoo shops in malls and instead of down back alleys in tourist towns, shops popped up on the main drags of big cities all over. With that, a BUNCH of people with no idea what they were asking for got into the tattoo business. While not in of itself a problem, the counterculture feel of this artform has been choked almost to death and with it, any sense of pride in a job well done that didn’t also come with a big, fat check.

Some shops are even offering financing for tattoos (lay-away is one thing, but if it comes with an interest rate, WTF?). While it may make dollars, it doesn’t make sense kids. Something has got to give. So, what does enough is enough mean?

It means once you have enough money, more isn’t necessary and community should matter more than the bottom line. In short, if no one can afford to get a tattoo, they won’t. Shops will close and more artists will get squeezed out of the business. While this may feel Darwinian, what it also means is more and more people will be tattooing from their houses and what ultimately happens is any sort of oversight of this industry gets eliminated and then, well, everything just goes back to shit, tattoo-business-wise.

Enough is enough.

Scorpion/Sub-Zero

Next in line for the 12 freebies is Scorpion/Sub-Zero. Hard to tell them apart in black and white, but they’re equally cool and Will grew up during the time when the Mortal Combat game blew up. Face it, you were either Street Fighter or Mortal Combat and Mortal Combat won, at least the live-action war.

Seems like some artists took a page out of the capitalism at all costs workbook. Charge so much that even if you barely work, you can get by. People are legit trying to get rich doing tattoos and when Will started tattooing that was never going to be the case. You hoped to make enough money for beer and cigarettes, feed the kids, keep a roof over your head, pay for gas. If you could make a living doing something you loved, that was reward enough.

Then they put tattooing on TV. Public acceptance of tattooing kept pace with it’s popularity and all of a sudden tattooing seemed not only like a legitimate professional choice for young artists, but something sort of prestigious. Then social media got ahold of it and a lot of people fell in love with something they didn’t even try to understand, but tried to tame instead.

In recent years tattoos have become so trendy it’s gotten a little gross. Facts: Tattoo shops aimed at tattooing drunken tourists have become a niche in Nashville and while that SOUNDS like it could be a lot of fun, it points out a big problem: Putting dollars ahead of the artwork and making money more important than people. It is an unsustainable practice and it’s obvious.

Tattoo shops are relocating to more affordable areas. Some artists are leaving the business altogether. Backlash and vitriol directed at the advent of generative AI (while deserved in some ways) is more of a knee-jerk reaction to a general thinning of the client base. Add to that the development of influencer-tattooers who charge spectacularly high rates because you only have to do one tattoo a week if you charge $4000 a day for them, people who may do nice tattoos but act like it causes them physical pain to do so, charging the shit out of unsuspecting customers who have no idea they could get the same quality of work from someone 20 minutes away whose only been tattooing for a few years and could really use the work. It’s called fleecing your customers, making suckers out of them, and it may be a good way to make money, but it’s a shit way to treat people.

We’re not firing shots at anyone here, just trying to point out what we see and over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to explain it’s effects and what we, specifically Will, intends to do about it.

Marcus Corvinus

Another 12 year anniversary piece, Marcus from the movie Underworld: Evolution. The quintessential monstrous vampire. Will’s actually got a tattoo of this bad boy on his chest, so of course he has a soft spot for ol’ batboy here.

Why free tattoos? Why not just a discount? Why not use it as some big promotion, make people jump through some hoops on social media to win the prize, instead of simply first-come, first-served? Because, 22 years in, Will still really enjoys tattooing.

Matter of fact, since the beginning of January this year, Will has been doing a free tattoo every week in order to prepare for what he’s been planning to announce here very soon. 7 months of doing a free tattoo at least once a week to make sure he wouldn’t burn out or regret it. He also needed to be sure it wouldn’t adversely impact his personal finances, so he took measures to slim down his budget and get real lean cost-of-living-wise. In the process, he learned something startling.

Enough is enough.

Stay tuned, this is gonna get good. We post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

The Batman Who Laughs

As part of our 12 year anniversary owner Will Wood decided to offer up 12 free tattoos of his choosing to any like-minded individual lucky enough to see the post and snap it up first. The Batman Who Laughs is the only subject matter he chose twice. Why? Because comic books.

Not only is the image of Bruce Wayne as the Joker strikingly intense, the idea of a monster with the mind of Batman is, to the comic book world at least, chilling. Look, its just plain cool, okay? And that’s what we’re here to talk about, because Will seems to think the tattoo business has managed to break itself.

But not irreparably so.

Tattoo prices are too high, especially at a time when food and gas prices have blown up and the typical tattoo demographic is being pinched so bad financially that 50 year mortgages and tiny houses in their parents’ back yards are starting to sound good. What’s a tattoo fan to do?

Stay tuned to this site. We’re going to be making some pretty exciting announcements in the next couple of weeks and you aren’t going to want to miss it. It’s some of the realest shit you’re going to hear, so put your big girl pants on, buttercup. It’s time to take a ride.

Cover-up Tattoo

When Raine came to us, there was one glaring issue that presented itself. SHE’S GOT BAD TATTOOS! She’s a young gal, and she didn’t know what she was getting into before she got them. It’s not her fault, y’all. But surrounded by talented artists, we knew we could help her out. Amanda took on this epic cover-up piece for a tattoo Raine wanted gone on her forearm, as part of a sleeve they’re working on together. It was a challenging piece to cover, but Amanda did a phenomenal job, and we couldn’t be happier with it.

Heart of Stone/Flesh

Another tattoo done by our very own Amanda, she just can’t help herself. We tell her all the time. “Amanda, you can’t just slam dunk every tattoo we give you.” “Amanda, you’re gonna kill someone, you can’t tattoo that well.” She just won’t listen. And so, in the face of adversity, challenged with a unique and difficult concept, she does it again. The heart in this tattoo transitions from stone to flesh, which is a very technically demanding look to pull off. Thank you Amanda, and thank you to her client. This is awesome.

Praying Hands with Cross

Amanda crushed this tattoo the other day, so we had to put it up. You see concepts like this often, praying hands, clock symbolism, that kind of thing. It’s hard to do something different when it’s such a classic concept. but Amanda took it on herself to design this layout herself, completely custom. She made something really special out of it, and this client walked away with a smile, and a tattoo that everyone loves.

VIking Wolf

If dogs are mans’ best friend, then it’s safe to assume that wolves may have been vikings’. In any case, it’s certainly cool to put them together in a tattoo. Wolves are a staple for tattoo artists everywhere, they exude cool. Whether you get them because you’re a lone wolf type, or because you like that hunter’s instinct, you just can’t lose. Vikings exist in that realm too, they’re masculine, and rugged. Combined, it makes for something special. We hope you love it.

(WIP) Skeleton Thigh

What’s the best part about working at a tattoo shop? You guessed it. This was done on one of our piercers, Raine, and she absolutely loves it. We do too, and although it’s not quite finished, we couldn’t help but show off a little.

Salvador Dali Portrait

One of the hardest parts about doing a solid portrait tattoo is finding a solid reference. Usually, the photo is old, or blurry, or straight-up garbage, to be frank. Dali loved a good self-portrait though, so when we got asked to do a tattoo of him, we knew we could knock it out of the park. That’s how you end up with a flawless, award-winning look like this. We can’t wait to see it healed!