As Pepe Nunez looks around at his eclectic collection of prints, paintings, sculptures and religious antiques that wrap around the walls of his tattoo shop on Freedom Boulevard, I ask him what his parents think about his profession. Nunez, a homegrown Watsonville tattoo artist, says he was raised by a single “traditional Mexican mother,” and was the middle child among his siblings. So while his brothers and sister were smothered in tough love or pampered with gifts and praise, he was left on his own to find his place in the world.
“I was more like the invisible kid,” says Nunez (no relation to this writer). “[My mother] wasn’t too strict with me.”
And yet, when he decided to pursue tattooing, he says she had several concerns about the path he had chosen. Had he started using drugs? Was he in a gang? Was he worshiping Satan?
“At first she was worried—as all parents are,” says Nunez. “But after she’s seen what I can do, now she likes it, or she can at least respect the fact that this is something that I’m really serious about and something I love to do.”
After spending more than a decade as a tattoo artist in Silicon Valley, Nunez has returned home. His shop, Classic Calavera Tattoo, is set to open sometime this week in a location near the intersection of Freedom Boulevard and Green Valley Road that previously housed a bike shop. Even though business was booming at Black Lagoon Tattoo in San Jose, Nunez says he always knew he wanted to return to his hometown to inspire the next generation of local artists and help Watsonville folks tell their stories through his art.
“This was always my goal: to give back to this community,” he says. “There’s so much life, a lot of hardworking people, a lot of struggle. There’s a lot of people here that need someone that can help them get across the person they are … everything I’ve gained from other places, I’ve brought back [to Watsonville].”
But his return has been anything but easy. It was more than a year ago that he first started looking into what it would take to set up a tattoo shop inside city limits. What he found was a slew of restrictions on the profession written into Watsonville’s municipal code by former politicians. For years, he wondered why there were no tattoo shops in Watsonville—why so many promising artists left the area and never came back. Now, it all makes sense.
“Going through all of this,” he says, “it feels like the restrictions are keeping [tattoo] businesses out.”
OVERDRAWN LAWS
In today’s climate, opening up a tattoo shop no longer carries the middle-finger-to-the-establishment connotation that it once did. The painful and expensive artistry is part of the zeitgeist of a current generation that values freedom of expression and individualism. But in Watsonville, that’s not the case.
Written into the municipal code as Body Art Facilities, tattoo shops face many of the same restrictions as liquor stores and cannabis dispensaries. They have to be 500 feet away from parks and schools, 750 feet away from another tattoo shop and 300 feet away from a liquor store, bar or restaurant with a bar. They also have to undergo an annual inspection from Watsonville Police Department, and no more than 25% of any window can be covered “with material that obscures the view into the Body Art Facility from the outside”—with no consideration for people who might be getting ink in a private area.
If that wasn’t overbearing enough, shops must go before the Watsonville Planning Commission for an annual review, where they could have their special use permit—which costs $6,000—revoked. Oh, and they have to reapply for the pricey permit every five years.
“The ordinance takes a very tough stance on tattoo shops,” says Suzi Merriam, the city’s Community Development Department director.
Merriam says that this was an intentional move by a largely conservative city council that was forced to update its rules around tattoo shops when a prospective business owner wanted to establish a location within city limits nearly two decades ago.
At the time, Watsonville had a de facto ban on tattoos that dated back to the 1960s, a time when, according to Pajaronian and city records, thousands of troops stationed at Fort Ord that were coming in and out of the Central Coast during the Vietnam War often visited South Main Street in Watsonville, an area of the city known at the time as a red-light district for its bars and nightlife. The fear then was the proliferation of blood-borne pathogens through prostitution, and dirty needles used for tattoos and drugs.
In 2007, however, concerns were much different. Geoff Wells and his mother—and lawyer—Kate Wells were threatening litigation against the city because of the de facto ban. They claimed, as plaintiffs in other cities successfully have, that it was unconstitutional because tattoos are a protected form of free speech. The Watsonville City Council struggled to quickly compromise on the restrictions that tattoo shops should face as it wrestled with fears that the businesses would promote gangs. As a result, the Wells family sued the city twice over the course of a two-year battle.
Geoff Wells says that about a year into the fight, he was ready to call it quits. But after speaking at a city council meeting, he received some motivation from then-Watsonville City Councilman Greg Caput, now the 4th District County Supervisor.
“Caput said, ‘You are a second class citizen and we don’t want second-class businesses in our city,’” Wells claims. “I was going to walk away. I was going to give up and go somewhere else. But after I heard that, I said, ‘Fuck that.’ I was going to fight it until we won.”
They did.
Freedom Tattoo opened in 2008 just a couple of doors down from where Nunez set up Classic Calavera Tattoo on Freedom Boulevard.
Freedom has since moved from its Watsonville location to a spot off Soquel Drive in Aptos. Setting up in the unincorporated area of the county, Wells says, was “super easy.” Other than being subject to the typical inspections from the County Health Department as part of state law, he faced few restrictions while making the move.
“We don’t need any special licenses, any of the bullshit that Watsonville has,” Wells says. “And that’s how it should be. Tattoo businesses are just that. They’re businesses like any other place.”
The City of Santa Cruz in 1984 repealed its prohibition on tattoos and lumped them in with other personal care businesses such as nail salons and hairdressers. The city also updated its Downtown Specific Plan in 2020 to allow tattoo shops in certain areas in the corridor, following a dispute with a business owner the year prior.
Scotts Valley and the county also treat tattoo shops no differently than other personal care businesses. But Capitola, like Watsonville before its current ordinance, has a de facto ban on tattoo shops in place that dates back to the ’60s. Their ordinance says that tattoos can only be done under a doctor’s supervision.
Larry Laurent, the assistant to Capitola City Manager Jamie Goldstein, says that Capitola has seen no pushback to the decades-old ordinance in recent years.
If there is, he says, the city would then look at what is mandated by the state.
Although Wells considers his fight against Watsonville a success, he argues that the current ordinance is yet another de facto prohibition on tattoo shops. If he had not pulled out of Watsonville, he wonders where exactly Nunez would have put his shop. It took him several months to find a location that fit within the restrictions, and he believes it would be even tougher to do so now with additional schools, bars, restaurants and, now, Nunez’s shop.
“And the sad thing is that no one [on the city council] is going to change the zoning for tattoo shops until someone sues the city again,” Wells says.
CULTURE SHOCK
Thinking back to the conversations the Watsonville City Council had while it developed the current body art ordinance, then-mayor Manuel Bersamin says that “the Watsonville of that period of time is not the Watsonville of today.” Specifically, he says that gang violence and crime spiked during the Great Recession, which coincided with the tattoo issue and fueled their fears that a tattoo shop would empower local gangs. He also says that the city council was in the midst of becoming more progressive and Latino, and that even the council members who supported this were worried about the impact a tattoo shop would have on the area’s youth.
“Watsonville was changing,” Bersamin says. “Watsonville is still changing, and we can’t forget that.”
Still, he says that the false connection the city council made between tattoo shops and gang proliferation—one that the city’s own police force shot down at the time—is difficult to look back on. It was tough then, he says, to separate the Watsonville that he grew up with, a city that struggled with violence and alcoholism because of its large collection of “cantinas” in South Main Street, from the community that Watsonville was becoming.
“I think we were trying so hard to break that stigma that Watsonville had for years that we couldn’t see tattoo shops for what they were,” says Bersamin, 69, who after he left the city council got a tattoo of his mother. “We didn’t know that they’d become something so acceptable in the way they are today, especially in Watsonville.”
Current Watsonville City Councilman Francisco “Paco” Estrada agrees with Bersamin. The child of Mexican immigrants, Estrada, 39, says that the worries the council voiced back in 2007 were the exact conversations he had with his parents when he was younger. For his parents, having a tattoo meant, among other things, that you were in a gang.
“Even though I heard that growing up over and over again, I didn’t believe any of it,” Estrada says with a chuckle. “As I got older, I learned about the reasons why people get tattoos. They tell a story of who these people are—they’re a part of their identity.”
Estrada respected his parents’ wishes and waited until he no longer lived under their household to get a tattoo. Now, he has three, including a sleeve on his left arm that Nunez did for him. He says that his mother was initially sad that he got a tattoo, but “her view on it changed just like her view on a lot of things have changed.”
“My parents aren’t the same sort of traditional Mexican parents that they once were,” he says, adding that their views on things such as LGBTQ+ rights have changed as well.
When Nunez was younger, he also associated tattoos with gangs and drugs. It wasn’t until he was out of high school that he saw the attention to detail and artistic prowess that went into the profession. A gifted artist as a kid, Nunez said that he gravitated toward the craft soon after.
“I saw it for what it was, a fine craft,” he says.
He hopes his art can do the same for others. He highlights the fact that he is bilingual—speaking fluently in Spanish and English—and wants to be a resource for Spanish speakers who are interested in getting a tattoo, but have been intimidated because of the language barrier. That roadblock, Nunez says, has only contributed to the misconceptions around tattoos in Latino-heavy communities like Watsonville.
“It’s all about making people feel safe, welcomed and taken care of,” he says. “I think that’s stopped some of the older people from getting tattoos, not being able to communicate what they want. That’s one thing I wanted to bring here, too: quality work for the common working man, all the Mexicanos and all the people that are not bilingual to have somewhere they can go where people can understand them. I want to take care of people here.”
