Who’s Next
A tattooed scalp under a single lamp, a pinball machine glowing by the door, flash climbing every wall — an afternoon with @strykertattoo at True Art Tattoo, on Soquel Avenue in Santa Cruz.
On Soquel Avenue, a few blocks from the Santa Cruz surf, there is a door with TRUE ART painted on the glass. Inside, the light is low and warm, the floor is a checkerboard, and the walls have long since disappeared under flash. We came to meet @strykertattoo — and he met us the way the best tattooers do: quiet, steady, looking straight at you.
Turn him to the side and the story continues on his skin: a scalp tattooed in fine black line, from the temple back over the crown. In a room full of drawings, he is the drawing that walks around.
A hand-painted sign on the yellow wall, between the panthers and the roses: GIVE ME A FOLLOW — STRYKERTATTOO. Old-school lettering for a new-school way of finding people. The tradition adapts. The craft stays the same.
The shop itself is a cabinet of wonders. An eagle spreads its wings over the front desk, a WALK-IN TATTOO banner glows orange and green, and every inch of wall is framed flash — swallows, daggers, roses, ships — the same vocabulary tattooers have spoken for a hundred years.
Over one doorway, a painted serpent and a banner: WHO’S NEXT. It is the oldest question in a tattoo shop, and the most hopeful one.
The rules are on the wall too, in big painted letters. No bozos, no bigots, no nonsense. Everyone else, come in.
In the corners, the shop keeps its own little shrine: a ceramic leopard watching the room, a skull lamp, a Virgin in a frame, a gumball machine and a stack of old comics. Taste, collected over years, one strange treasure at a time.
And by the window, a vintage pinball machine — a dancer in red on the backglass, lights still blinking. Something to play while you wait your turn. Something to remember the place by.
We stepped back out onto Soquel Avenue into the bright coastal light. Behind us the door swung shut on the lamps and the flash and the steady buzz of a machine. Somewhere inside, someone was already asking the question again: who’s next?
