Since 1989

Thirty-five years on one road.

Inkslingers opened in the late eighties and has been tattooing metro Detroit ever since — through three recessions, an industry that reinvented itself twice, and more than two million tattoos.

How it started

Mike Jeziak opened Inkslingers in the late 1980s, drawing on the tattooing he'd grown up watching. At the time, tattooing in Michigan was a largely unregulated trade — good shops existed, but so did a lot of operations with no meaningful standards, and nothing forced anybody to choose the first over the second.

He built the business on the opposite premise: that people getting something permanent deserve to know exactly what's going into their skin, who's holding the machine, and what the equipment has been through. That's an unremarkable thing to say now. In 1989 it was a competitive position.

Raising the floor for everyone

Mike went on to help establish the American Association of Tattoo Studios, an organization founded to push sterilization and safety standards across the industry rather than just inside one shop. The practices it advocated — single-use needles, verified sterilization, barrier protection, documented bloodborne pathogen training — are now baseline expectations at any studio worth walking into.

The studio has since gone past that baseline. Inkslingers runs fully disposable — nothing is reprocessed between clients, and every piece of body jewelry arrives pre-sterilized and sealed from the manufacturer. There is no sterilization cycle to get wrong because there is nothing left to sterilize.

Being an early voice on that is the part of the shop's history we're proudest of. It cost money and it helped competitors, and it made getting tattooed in Michigan measurably safer.

The work that traveled

Detroit's music scene ran through this shop for decades, and over the years work from Inkslingers has ended up on Kid Rock, Britney Spears, Eminem and the Dixie Chicks, among others. It's a genuine part of the story and we're not going to pretend otherwise — but we don't discuss anyone's work without their say-so, and it's not what we lead with.

What actually matters is the two million-plus tattoos on either side of those appointments. The machinists and nurses and veterans and teachers. The families now bringing in grown children we tattooed in the nineties. Those are the tattoos that built a thirty-five year business, and they got exactly the same hands and the same standard.

Where we are now

The studio sits at 50185 Gratiot Ave in Chesterfield Township, on the Gratiot corridor that has run through this business from the beginning. It's a bigger space than we've had before — private rooms for piercings and long sessions, room for artists to work without stepping over each other, and parking right out front.

Same ownership. Same standards. Same road. Meet the artists →

Newsprint advertisement headed Tattoo of the Month, reading From Fantasy Tattoo to Reality, for Ink Slingers on Gratiot Avenue in Roseville — Early ad“From fantasy tattoo to reality.” Autoclave sterilization led the ad copy decades before it was required — 29961 Gratiot Ave, Roseville, with shops in Waterford, Mt. Clemens and Taylor.

Front page of The Macomb Daily dated Monday, March 4, 1996, with the headline Body art bill above an article on tattoo and tanning regulation — The Macomb Daily · 4 March 1996“Body art bill — tattoo, tanning parlor owners welcome proposed parental consent law.” The shop argued for the rules, not against them.

A tattooer working on a seated client's arm in a busy studio in the 1990s, both looking toward the camera — Kid Rock's first tattoo, done at Inkslingers.

What we hold to

Four things that haven't changed.

Say the hard thing

If a design won't survive at the size you want, if a cover-up needs laser first, if the anatomy won't take the piercing — you hear it before you pay, not after.

Single-use, every time

One hundred per cent disposable. Needles, tubes, cartridges and razors are opened in front of you and binned after. Jewelry arrives pre-sterilized in sealed packaging. Stations are barrier-filmed and stripped between every client.

The right hand for the job

You get matched with the artist whose portfolio fits your idea, not whoever's free. If nobody here is right for it, we'll tell you that too.

Built for year twenty

Contrast planned in advance, line weight sized for how skin actually settles. Fresh is easy. Healed and still sharp in two decades is the job.

From the wall

Thirty-five years, framed.

Most of what follows has hung in one shop or another for decades — clippings, signed photographs, a billboard, a watch from Washington. It was scanned rather than restaged, so the creases and the handwriting are the originals'.