By Ann Volkwein
Portraits by Gregory Cherin

Every art form has the power to move us emotionally. Music shifts our moods, rewiring a room in the time it takes to cross it. In the culinary arts, a chef’s creation is taken in by all senses, a full-bodied experience lasting the length of a meal. But tattooing is more demanding. The ink is permanent—til death do us part. It’s a pact, not a product. Tattooing has quietly become a vital art scene between the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires. Three artists, working within an hour of each other, tell us exactly how tattooing gets under your skin.

Nalla Smith

Sticks & Stones, Hillsdale, NY
@nallasmith

Nalla Smith grew up in the gritty, vibrant New York of the ’70s and ’80s. Tattooing was legally banned until 1997, but the underground artists who first turned his head as a student at the High School of Art and Design advertised themselves in zines he found at smoke shops. The work was crude and brilliant, refusing to read like the sailor or jailhouse work that had long defined the trade. “They were starting to look like no one told them there were boundaries,” Smith says.

The watershed moment was Ed Hardy’s “Tattoo Time” periodical, proving, as Smith puts it, that “anything you could think of could be a tattoo.”

Hardy says he was the first art-school artist to make the scene. “It was like the Beatles,” Smith says, “mixing and matching, pushing the old formulas.”

Smith pierced at San Francisco’s Body Manipulations and then apprenticed at Erno’s Tattoo, before finding his way to a job at Ed Hardy’s studio. From there, he owned East Side Ink on the Lower East Side, then Goose Tattoo in Williamsburg, and landed at Hudson River Tattoo before opening Sticks & Stones last November.

His style evolved from broad strokes and tribal through the early ’90s, and shifted to the small, thin work no one else wanted to do when he opened Goose in 2010. Every shop in the country was doing bold traditional, so refined work came to him by referral. Soon after, Instagram introduced Korean tattooers; their super fine work, he says, “became a lighthouse in the fog.” Thirty years in, he’s not as precious about it. “No matter how good you are at it, it’s a pretty lo-fi art form,” he says. “It won’t look good forever, and neither will we—but it’ll look cool because it’s a part of you.”

Sam Laiz

Happy Place, Hudson, NY
@sad_tatter

Sam Laiz calls his style “illustrative, ignorant, and fine line.” That’s ignorant in tattoo-world parlance: crude, childish on purpose, playful by design. He draws from out-of-print children’s books from the 1940s, turning those images into designs.

“Tattooing was kind of a gatekept group for a long time,” says Laiz. “Social media blew the doors wide open—not just the Sailor Jerry, traditional stuff. So, it’s become this big community.”

A self-taught tattoo artist, Laiz grew up in Egremont, bartended through his twenties in New York, and pivoted to tattooing during COVID. In Los Angeles, he papered the city with flyers offering free tattoos to build his hand and was booked within days. Four years later, he’s inking full-time out of his private Hudson studio, at pop-ups across the region, and quarterly in L.A. Around 60% of his local clients find him through a single flyer on the board at Mel’s Bakery.

At the pop-ups, many of his clients are first timers. “It’s really personal,” he says. “You want the experience to be as comfortable as possible. Half the time, I feel like I’m a therapist.”

Desi Shah

Shy Bird Tattoo, Great Barrington
@shybirdtattoo

Desi Shah’s work is entirely black and gray, heavy on dot-work and stipple shading, pulled from folklore, fairy tales, and what she calls “magical little made-up animals”—imagery that she started building in her imagination as a child in the mountains of Vermont.

In fact, Shah drew all the time while growing up—no surprise since her mother was an illustrator. After a stint as a vet tech, she arrived at tattooing.

“I was drawn to it as a way to make art that lives on people’s bodies,” she says. She apprenticed at Brooklyn’s Fleur Noire, then was part of the Bushwick collective Chimera before heading north a year ago with her partner and their 3-year-old son, Ember. “The quiet and lack of overstimulation,” she says, “has given my brain more space to be creative in new ways.”

Her by-appointment studio sits above GB Eats. Freehand tattoos, sketched directly onto the skin with markers, are a specialty. “Tattoos are a moment in time embedded in your skin,” she says. “It’s storytelling. It’s ritual. It’s really sacred.”

Special thanks to Half Rats in Great Barrington for hosting our photo shoot of Sam and Desi.