Travis Sengaus

The Calgary Tattoo and Arts Festival opens this weekend, bigger than before and even featuring a roller derby match, but there is a strange new player in the tattoo world hovering on the horizon, all polymer and lab coat.
            While the festival will feature cars, motorbikes, music and everything tattoo, one thing it will not be offering its thousands of visitors is a new ink, created in a lab and sold under the name Freedom-2. “Yeah, no one’s going to use it, I can guarantee you that,” says Steve Peace, one of the founders and the organizer of the festival, prior to launching into a verbal lashing of the soon-to-be-introduced product.
            Freedom-2 is a new ink designed to be removed more easily than existing ones, typically with one laser treatment, as opposed to the more conventional 10 or 15. The company also hopes to reduce the pain involved in treatment by tailoring a laser to deal specifically with its product.
            The ink is encapsulated in polymer beads that keep the dye from leaching into the skin, but upon application of a laser, the beads break open, and the ink flows into the surrounding tissue.
            Martin Schmieg, the president and CEO of Freedom-2, says the response to the product ahead of its late fall launch has been “varied.”
            “If you’re a consumer and you’ve always wanted to have a tattoo but you have been fearful of the permanence, or safety of tattoos, the response has been great,” says Schmieg. “I would also say that if you are a parent of a teenager, which we get a lot of responses from, you’re very excited. If you are a hardcore, very traditional tattoo artist, you’ll be very skeptical and very leery about what we’re doing.”
            Kat Von D, the star of The Learning Channel’s L.A. Ink, is one such die-hard. She also happens to be the headline name at the festival again this year, bringing her sultry good looks and stunning work to the floor of the Roundup Centre. “I kind of think that’s a bunch of bullshit. One of the reasons to get tattooed is the permanence,” says Von D.
            Although she admits to having a few tattoos removed with traditional laser treatment, often a long and painful process, she stresses the pieces were amateur jobs done before she reached the magic age of adulthood. “I don’t necessarily think it’s a slap to the face of each artist, I just feel like, myself, I wouldn’t like tattooing people that were concerned with the permanency.”
            Local artist Scott Veldhoen of Eternal Image Tattoo in Inglewood, and a participant in the festival, echoes Von D’s concern. “I like the fact that that holds you accountable for the rest of your life. I think that’s cool, there’s not enough of that in this day and age. So much stuff doesn’t last. People don’t give a shit anymore,” he says. “My customers, that’s not what they’re coming in to get tattooed for.”
            Haunting the festival floor, sporting backs, arms, necks, legs and sometimes even faces covered in tats, it’s likely to be the kind of crowd that doesn’t think too much about removal. The inked-up crowd can look forward to an even bigger show this year, according to Peace. “We’re double the size of last year. The size that we are at now, most tattoo shows won’t even go near, just because it’s too risky. It’s 100,000 square feet, where most tattoo shows are 15,000,” he says.
            Next year, he’s eyeing up the Stampede Corral to house a stage for the roller derby and live music for post-show concerts that will upstage this year’s off-site performance of Nashville Pussy at Snatch. “I’m doing Motorhead next year. That’s my goal,” he says. “My goal this year was Nashville Pussy and it happened, so….”
            Loud music, tattoos everywhere, even celebrities that owe their fame to inking skin on television. The festival is about all things tattoo, so what about the lab coats sitting anxiously on the sidelines?
            “The art of tattooing has been around for thousands of years or better,” says Schmieg. “The science of tattooing is really just becoming known today. What I mean by that is how pigments and dyes react when they’re in the skin. Freedom-2 was founded out of a desire to understand what was happening with tattooing in the skin and to engineer a product that corrected what modern chemistry made unsafe, by adding new, modern chemistry to make it safe.”
            Maybe they’ll be around the festival floor next year?
            “We’re not interested,” concludes Peace.