Destiny City Tattoo Shoots for Excellence | Style

In our sister publication South Sound Business’ latest issue, it’s getting to know some of the businesses that make up Tacoma’s Antique Row. Read last week’s profile here; meet some of the faces behind Destiny City Tattoo below. 

To tattoo artist Miko Mueller’s black-spectacled eyes, “inspiration is everything.”

“If you are not inspired to make a better drawing or better artwork to make your tattoo, you’re in trouble, because you’re just gonna be sticking s— on people that’s subpar or pulled off the internet,” Mueller concluded one weekday evening, a dyad of piercingly bright tattoo lights illuminating a pair of small black tattoos stamping his right cheek and outer ear. “You got to be inspired — and a big way for inspiration is the people that you work around.”

Mueller is one of the primary artists at Destiny City Tattoo, a small, black-walled parlor mood-lit by a trio of bejeweled black chandeliers and chiefly decorated with tone-setting, locally sourced artwork. (Among the pieces are a black-and-white portrait of one of the ghoulishly avaricious aliens of John Carpenter’s “They Live,” a female cyclops emerging from a red rose’s pistil, a woman with amply tattooed legs adjusting her shiny black heels.) It was opened in 2015 by Chad Baratti, who, like Mueller, has made artistic excellence the shop’s utmost priority.

“We’re not in the industry to just throw a bunch of tattoos on people and make as much money as we can,” Baratti said.

Mueller, who specializes in Japanese-style and American traditional-style art, is a nearly 30-year veteran who’s been with the parlor since 2016. Connor Hagerty, another Destiny City Tattoo artist whose fortes are neo-traditional and geometric styles, has been at the shop for two years.

“I like connecting with clients and building that connection — it’s more than the actual tattoo,” he said.

The number of artists serving the public at Destiny City Tattoo was whittled down by the pandemic — “COVID wiped out half the shop right away; two people had to go immediately,” Mueller said — though things are on track to grow. Mueller has been apprenticing his cosmetic tattoo-interested wife for the last year, and Jesse McConaha, an artist who last worked at Bloomington, Illinois’ Iron & Ink Custom Tattoo and Piercing, came on board in March.

“I just fell in love with the artistry, and I can tell that the people working there … have just an absurd amount of wisdom and specialty in their tattoos that I could potentially learn from,” McConaha said.

Mueller is looking forward to seeing the shop fill up again, highlighting the importance of having a parlor full of artists that aren’t merely talented but “good people (who) are here for the betterment of the shop in the neighborhood — being a part of what’s going on out here.”

The good fortune of making a living doing work he enjoys isn’t lost on him.

“You can’t ask for more in life than to have a job that you love, that can sustain you,” Mueller said. “This has always been that for me: the highs and the lows, the goods and the bads.”