Studio Information

Medway Tattoo & Piercing Centre is situated at 392 Rochester High Street, (the Chatham end!), approximately a quarter mile from Rochester train station, and about half a mile from Chatham train station. Both stations are on the main line from London. It's location, on the corner of Gundulph Rd./High St is hard to miss, as it has a frontage of about 110ft! The Victorian building has massive windows, which give the studio a bright and airy feel, and of course lots of natural daylight to tattoo and draw by! This was to be our first studio, and we opened our door on 20/04/2000. Our brief was to make the studio bright, clean, friendly, honest and open. I think we achieved that!

The street door opens into the large reception area, ruled over by the reception girls. All our Tattoo flash designs are in 24, A3 size display books, with 48 pages per book, that?s well over 1000 pages of A3 flash on display. I hate flash on the walls; it always looks grubby to me. There is also a photo album on display for each resident artist; RAY, BEN, and the lovely DOM who has just joined us from Brighton (see their portfolio?s for examples of work). We find it helps our customers to see designs actually on skin as well as on paper. We encourage customers to pick the artist to work on them, or we will advise one artist over another, based on their speciality in that subject or style.

Also on display is a photo album of ARANS piercing work, and a large display cabinet with an extensive range of piercing jewellery to view. We are currently expanding our range of organic jewellery, as we have found the more natural materials give fewer problems in some piercings. A double-glazed 8ft x 4ft window looks directly into the Tattoo work area. Each of our 3 resident artists has their own working area, with separate sinks and facilities. We all prefer this open studio design, as it allows the artists to view other styles, allow the customers to see other work being done, and encourages the camaraderie and team spirit in all of them. The constant stream of jokes and banter are a free bonus!!!

All the Tattoo areas can be screened off for full privacy. RAY painted the mad mural on the back wall, incidentally. The stairs up lead to our drawing and computer area. The computer is mainly used for lettering and word art. It enables us to quickly produce names and words in any size in many fonts, but Old English is still the most popular! The stairs down lead to the cellar, with its various storage areas. Off the Tattoo work area is the separate self-contained Piercing room. This is ARAN?s domain, and you had better not even think about going in there unless you are invited, and even then TOUCH NOTHING! You should be able to make out all these areas from the photos on our site. Our pricing structure is at present based on ?60 per hour. We have a ?25 minimum charge. If you want to book an appointment with an artist, we want a deposit of ?20 for every hour (in other words, if you want to book say 2 hours work, we need a ?40 deposit). If you don?t show up the deposit is non refundable unless you notify us at least 24hrs in advance! We can design custom artwork for you, but require a deposit from you so we are not wasting our time!

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