Rebel Rebel Tattoo | Photo by Jessica Fugett | The Wright State Guardian
In the heart of the Historic Oregon District sits Rebel Rebel Tattoo. Owners Josh Wilson and Robbie Bauer had been tattooing together for around 10 years before opening the popular location.
“We made an agreement that if we decided to go, we would go together,” said Wilson.
A prime location
Rebel Rebel Tattoo’s location on Fifth St. had been a tattoo shop for about 20 years before, previously owned by Glenn Scott.
“We’ve gotten to learn more about everyone in the area and meet everybody else. We help each other out,” said Wilson.
Thursday through Saturday is the most common time for walk-ins, usually when more people are frequenting the Historic Oregon District.
“We still catch time between appointments and have people that come in at the right time to do a walk-in. When I first started tattooing, I just did walk-ins, but now it’s mostly appointments,” said Wilson.
The dedicated following
Rebel Rebel Tattoo has a long list of clientele, old and new. A large part of the clientele includes people the artists have worked on for years prior.
“Probably 80 percent of the people followed from past locations,” said Bauer.
There are four artists working at Rebel Rebel Tattoo including Bauer and Wilson, as well as Jessica Poole and Kevin McKinnon.
“I absolutely loved coming in here to get my tattoo, and the shop has very talented artists. Kevin was able to draw up the tattoo I wanted perfect on the first sketch. I definitely plan on coming back for more tattoos,” said Lyssa Murray, according to an online review.
‘Patience is important’
With the convenience of services like Amazon Prime and food delivery services that will appear at your door almost immediately, the patience of holding out for a good tattoo is wearing thin.
“Since there’s just four of us here, it’s hard to get to everyone. When people are interested in getting a tattoo and they can’t get it as soon as they want, they might go somewhere else,” said Wilson. “We can’t spread ourselves too thin. Patience is important, it’s really about what you’re wanting the end-game to be.”
The most common tattoos for Wilson and Bauer would be lettering, floral and religious symbols.
“With Pinterest being popular, there’s a lot of super simplistic and minimal designs. That’s typically the walk-ins that we try to squeeze in because they don’t take a lot of time,” said Bauer. “It’s a challenge because they’re so simple because if there is an imperfection, everyone can tell. They’re usually super thin delicate lines and you have to really put trust in the client to make sure they’re still enough.”
While they still enjoy doing these tattoos, the artists look forward to doing different ideas.
“Usually, the strangest requests are my favorite,” said Bauer. “There are probably about 10 subjects of tattoo matter that come in a lot that we’ve been doing our whole careers which is completely fine but every once in a while someone will come in with something off the wall and that gets us pretty excited too. The stranger the better.”
