Evermore Tattoo Parlour opened on Newnham Street in 2012, and 14 years on, owner Nick Barratt says he still gets pure joy from meeting and connecting with people over art and ideas.
What started with Nick working seven days a week has evolved into a custom, appointment-only studio with a team of talented, passionate and diverse artists.
To accompany the portraits by photographer Cameron Scrimgeour, we asked Nick about the ethos at the heart of Evermore, the best business advice he’s been given and the other Bedford indies that he always recommends to his customers…
“I opened Evermore Tattoo Parlour back in 2012. I was born and raised in Bedford, so it feels great to have built something that’s been so embraced and means so much to so many people in the town I grew up in – and now 14 years on, the reputation we’ve built and the relationships we’ve formed with our community are absolutely priceless.”
You have been at the heart of Newnham Street for 13 years. What is the ethos that drives your business?
I know it sounds corny, but I literally say it to every artist who joins the team at Evermore: the most important thing is just to be nice.
That’s it, really.
Getting a tattoo is a big deal, the bravery it takes to share your ideas, to get booked in, and then to walk through the studio door – we get to do a lot of people’s first tattoos, so they have no idea what to expect, but even for people getting their 100th tattoo, it’s always a big day.
It’s incredibly brave, so we never look at our job as ‘just another day at work’, because it’s not, you’re meeting a person who’s having this exciting experience where they’re trusting you with their skin.
So we remind ourselves of that constantly, and we try to make the experience as special as we can for them, and that all starts with kindness.
How have you seen tattooing evolve? What is your favourite style to create?
Style-wise, I tend to work a lot in black and grey realism, but the studio covers many different styles.
I love working in other styles too; it depends on what I’m asked to do. Tattooing has changed a lot, even since I started in 2010; it’s a very different industry now.
Social media has had the biggest impact on it, I think. At its core, I think it’s still the same – if you do good work and treat people with respect, they’ll probably come back, and they might even tell others about you, and then you get two of the most powerful things a business can hope for: repeat business and word of mouth recommendations.
Social media is great for showing people what you do, though and now people are doing really interesting things with it, showing off not just what they do but who they are, which is great – I think it’s a great tool for that.
It’s also made the industry more transparent, which has been a good thing.
One of the main things I set out to achieve with Evermore was to create a safe place for artists and clients, and it makes me incredibly proud to say I believe I’ve achieved that.
What is the best business advice you’ve been given?
The best piece of business advice I ever got was told to me on a tiny boat in a crocodile-infested lake in the Mexican jungle in the early hours of the morning.
The man who gave it to me had been a broker, or similar job where the money was way too good to walk away from, but he was bored.
On paper, it was great, it was the 80s, he was doing business in Miami and LA, going to beach parties, living the high life, but there was no passion.
One morning, he was at the airport, about to fly to a meeting that would have meant the biggest commission he’d ever seen and a promotion if everything went well, when his pager alerted him to call the hospital.
He’d had some tests done on a lump in his neck, and they needed him to go in for a conversation. He explained he couldn’t miss this meeting, but he couldn’t have this hanging over him, so he convinced them to give him the results over the phone.
It was Melanoma and they gave him six months to live.
He never went to the meeting; he went to his mum’s and cried for the next two weeks – until his mum, the hero of the story, told him, “That’s enough of that now. You’ve got six months and more money than most people will ever have. What do you want to spend this time doing? Because I’m not letting you waste it crying to me.”
So he thought hard – he had two main passions, the Mayan civilisation and Scuba diving.
So he moved to Mexico, took a job in a dive shop selling keyrings and snorkles and spent every minute reading about the Mayans. He went to dig sites, met scientists doing excavations, took course after course in Scuba diving, and met a French girl in the dive shop.
Six months became a year. A year became two years. The scientists needed someone who not only knew about the Mayans but also had diving qualifications, as some of the artefacts are in flooded underground caves.
Two years became three. He had done every course he could and was now as highly certified as a Scuba diver can be. Three years became five.
He was given the all clear.
Today, or last I heard, he is still living a life filled with passion. He told me, on that rickety little boat, that it was no mystery to him how it had happened; he had chased happiness, and everything else fell into place.
And that’s the advice: find something that makes you happy, that you think you could do every day, and you think you could do well, and find a way to build your life around that thing. Everything else will come.
Which Bedford indie do you recommend to your customers?
Most of our local recommendations are for places we use ourselves – we love Say Doughnuts (Mill Street) and Vanilla Tree (St Cuthbert’s Street), which does the best bagels you’ll find anywhere.
My favourite coffee in Bedford would be from Caffe Crema on the High Street, great coffee and lovely people. One of the Evermore artists is vegan, and I know she really enjoys Green Earth Cafe in St Paul’s Square.
Bedford is full of interesting, talented people; there’s probably more I should recommend, but these are the ones we literally use on a day-to-day basis.
You can follow Nick and the team at Evermore on their Instagram page. You can see more of Cameron’s photos in the February issue of the Bedford Clanger. Read it online here.
Evermore Tattoo Parlour, 3 Newnham Street, Bedford MK40 3JR
