Local tattoo artist carves out niche in Eau Claire body art

By Leah Rado
radolc@uwec

 First timers at Penetrations may not get what they expect when they walk in. The large, spacious room resembles a living room or a small art gallery rather than a tattoo parlor. The waiting area is clean and well lit with art and different masks on the walls. Red leather couches sit in a circle around a coffee table that holds photo albums full of different kinds of tattoos.
           
A hallway resembles a hotel with doors on each side heading into separate rooms. Head down the hall, and the resemblance is lost. The rooms are equipped with chairs and different sorts of lighting as well as carts full of ink and needles. The sound of needles humming across people’s backs, ankles or biceps comes from behind the doors.
           
Sitting shirtless in one of those chairs is Charles Bignell. He is getting a Pagan star tattooed across his back. The needle hums and whines, sounding like nails on a chalk board, but Bignell doesn’t even flinch. “It’s taken a little less than two hours,” said Bignell, calmly looking at his watch.
           
The artist sitting behind Bignell isn’t fazed by his client talking or the sounds of the needle. He fills in a few spots and wipes excess ink off of the newly blackened symbol. He steps back to admire his work, then quietly starts cleaning up as another worker comes in to take pictures of the new tattoo.
           
“Looks good. You should be able to use that one, right?” the worker motions to the digital photo as the artist continues to clean up.
           
“Yeah, that should work.”
           
Dave Apfel has only been a professional tattoo artist for a year and a half, but to him, Bignell is just another canvas to show off his work. “It’s normal now; I don’t even think about it,” Apfel said. “I’ve done hundreds of tattoos.”
           
Apfel, 27, is employed in one of the fastest-growing retail businesses in America and works at Primitive Penetrations, 408 Riverside Ave., one of eight tattoo parlors in Eau Claire. About 15 percent of Americans, about 40 million people, have a tattoo, according to a 2003 Harris Poll. That’s up from six percent of the American population in 1936. The same study indicates that 13 percent of the population between the ages of 18 and 24 – the key population for tattoo artists in college communities like Eau Claire – have at least one tattoo.

Apfel has been tattooing professionally for a little more than a year and “not-so-professionally” – practicing on willing friends and friends of friends – for about eight years.
           
Apfel has always liked to draw and happened into the business almost by chance. “I was in the right spot at the right time,” Apfel said. “My parents knew some biker-type tattoo artists, and it was intriguing, so I decided to give it a try. It worked out.”
 Getting licensed wasn’t too difficult either. While some tattoo artists are required to go through apprenticeships that take years and cost thousands of dollars, Apfel went a different route.
           
“I tattooed myself and butchered my arms up,” he said, grinning.

“(My first tattoo) is buried underneath all this mess somewhere. It’s a smiley face right here,” said Apfel, pointing to a spot on his lower right arm.

Apfel looks every bit the tattoo artist he is. His left arm is nearly black in spots from his first attempts at tattoos and years of practicing on himself. His right arm is covered with tattoos sketched by various artists around the country. He points to a ship on his left bicep, one of the only colored tattoos on that arm. “I’m almost full-blooded Norwegian, so I had to get the Viking ship and the Norse Thor’s hammer,” Apfel said.

“Oh, and I’m a skull fanatic,” he said, pointing to a tattoo of a skull at the base of his neck. The skin around it is still puffy and red. “I just got that one today.”

A ring through his nose, a long goatee and plugs – or spacers – in each of his ear lobes complete the look for Apfel, who first tattooed someone else seven years ago. “It was a clown. I was pretty nervous the first time I did a tat on anyone else,” the soft-spoken Eau Claire resident said. “I hacked him up pretty good. I ended up covering it up actually about a year ago.”

Apfel practiced on friends until he got more comfortable with the idea of tattooing and putting something so permanent on someone else’s body. “I like to call them victims,” said Apfel, laughing about his first attempts. “Once I figured out and grasped the clue that I needed, people were pretty much just starting to come by and I was not so nervous and realized, ‘OK, this isn’t a friend; this is just a tattoo.’ ”

Apfel has only worked in Eau Claire as a professional tattoo artist and says Japanese letters and tribal symbols are the most popular types of tattoos among the mainly college-aged cliental, but not his favorite. “I specialize in dark, demonic style of tattooing. I don’t like doing a lot of the really bright colors, and I won’t even attempt a portrait,” Apfel said. “I like the death scenes.”

Despite the new tattoo on his own neck, Apfel says that he won’t touch hands or necks for various reasons. “People that don’t really know what they’re going to do for a career go to try and look for a job, and bosses are going to see the tattoos on their hands,” Apfel said. “As ridiculous as it sounds, people get judged for having tattoos.”

Though so much of the population is tattooed, 42 percent of the non-inked population feel that those with tattoos are less attractive, and 31 percent think those with ink are less intelligent.

“I think it’s bogus,” Apfel said. “The world is too judgmental as far as I’m concerned. They just need to relax. People always look twice at people with a whole bunch of tattoos and piercings all over. It’s sickening, but you get used to it.”

Bignell echoed Apfel’s sentiments. “Yeah, it’s obvious (that non-tattooed people look down on those with tattoos),” Bignell said. “People look down on me and I just walk away from them. There’s not much I can do about it.”

To Apfel, tattoos aren’t symbols of rebellion or disrespect; they’re art and a form of self expression, one that should be treated like any other art form. “If you look around, there’s art pretty much everywhere you look,” he said. “Signs in the windows and billboards on the freeway, it’s some form of art. Yet tattoos and piercings are supposed to be hidden. I don’t like it.”

As he finished cleaning and sanitizing the room from Bignell’s newest mode of self-expression, Apfel acknowledged that it would be next to impossible to get a different job. “I’m going to make a career (out of tattooing),” Apfel said. “It would be hard to get a professional desk job with all of these tattoos.”

He quietly put away the last of the needles, then headed back to the front desk to wait for his next canvas to walk into the door.

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