It started in a converted school bus painted to look like outer space. It was 1994, and Kitty Love and her other young, punk, tattoo artist friends wanted to get far away from Baltimore, which they’d found too full of drugs and violence.
They took to the road, driving all over the country in their cosmic bus, eventually stopping to tattoo hippies at a Rainbow Gathering in Colorado. One of them told her about a place called Asheville.
The space bus eventually made its way to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where, Love says, “there were enough freaks on the street to make me think a tattoo shop might work.” Thus, in 1996, she became, as far as she knows, Asheville’s first female tattoo artist.
Bikers and punks
Nearly 30 years later, Western North Carolina has become much friendlier to the art of tattooing. A quick online search lists about 20 tattoo studios in Asheville alone, and the Asheville Tattoo Arts Festival celebrated its sixth year in September. But when Love, now 60, moved to the area, the scene was very different…