"If you want a real taste of what a mad scientist he is, he did this with Q-tips."
Duffy "Moon" Foster, owner of Tiger Tattoo, is in the back of his shop pointing at a painting that's over 3 feet tall and 2 feet across. A serpentine dragon with intricate scales and detailed color work sprawls across the entire canvas, enveloped by a black cloud. The bottom right corner reads "To Duff," with the artist's signature below: Walt Dailey.
Dailey typically worked with something sharper than cotton swabs. He opened one of Spokane's earliest tattoo shops, Tiger Tattoo, in 1978. It's now the longest-running tattoo parlor in Spokane. Dailey is legendary to those who know him for his artistic ingenuity and mind blowing, painstaking dedication to the craft.
Seven years ago, Dailey retired and sold Tiger Tattoo to Foster, a longtime employee and friend. "Nice Guy Duffy," as Foster's also called, is happy to preserve the founder's work. Plenty of Dailey's art still hangs on the walls of the parlor, a testament to the influence he's had not only in his own shop but across the globe.
"In the '90s, Walt was one of the top 10 tattooers in the world," Foster says.
A military medic by trade and a self-taught artist, Dailey spent the entire first year after his service ended holed up in a small rented room on the Palouse. For months on end, he drew designs, mixed inks and created tools until he felt ready to emerge a professional artist. Even after Dailey opened his shop, the obsession didn't quit.
"He would pick a subject and draw it 1,000 times," Foster says. "He would draw it until he was brilliant at it."
Dailey incorporated Japanese flair into the American traditional style to create familiar but unique designs — melting skulls, angry eagles, caricatured reapers and, of course, plenty of tigers.
Throughout his career, Dailey attended national and international tattoo conventions. He would sweep awards, Foster says. Dailey's expertise earned the respect of other famous artists like Mike Malone and Don Ed Hardy, fathers of the modern tattoo era. In 2018, Dailey won the Bob Shaw award, a lifetime achievement award, from the National Tattoo Association.
Foster himself is also a self-taught artist who learned "completely the wrong way," he says. But with a twirled mustache, clear-rimmed glasses, a swanky fedora and arms covered with colorful sleeves, he seems the quintessential tattoo artist today.
Back in the '80s, Foster was a single father and thought he couldn't afford an apprenticeship with Dailey. So he decided to become a competitor at a tattoo shop in Hillyard. For nine years, the competition sharpened both artists' techniques. When Foster's landlord suddenly closed his shop, an impressed Dailey opened up a spot for him at Tiger just a couple months later.
They worked together for decades, until Dailey wanted to retire. Foster bought Tiger Tattoo and moved it to its current spot on Sprague Avenue, where an old strip club used to be. He transformed the space with huge gallery walls of art, a comfortable open floor plan and a giant tiger leaping across the front window. There's also an altar in the back for the dancers Foster suspects haunt the building.
Foster and the five other artists who work at Tiger have different specialties but still like to riff on the American traditional style, expanding Dailey's imagination with their own. They do "Flash Fridays" every first Friday, where each artist draws a dozen or so new designs for smaller, badge-style tattoos, and those are the only designs available in the shop that day. It keeps them sharp and forces them to flex their creativity.
If you look closely at the gallery wall, some of the drawings are collaborations between Dailey and the current artists. One half of a design is detailed by Dailey, the other half is filled in by current artists like Holly Bruch or Sienna Jacobsen. Elements are shared by both, but the modern artist pushes the boundaries further with color or shapes or abstraction. You can literally trace the influence across generations.
Despite the excess of new tattoo parlors that have popped up across the city, Tiger Tattoo stays busy. In addition to plenty of clients, Dailey himself stops in most weeks just to check in, hang out, draw and play backgammon. But despite his OG status, most people don't recognize him anymore. As tattooing becomes more trendy, aspiring tattooists rush to start their own businesses and skip their history homework.
"It's a lot of young kids now that don't even know who Walt is," Foster says. "There's probably 100 shops between here and Airway Heights. It's like Starbucks now."
But Foster's confident that Tiger Tattoo will outlast him, Dailey and the competition. No matter what, the shop has left a permanent mark on Spokane. Mostly with needles, sometimes with pencils, and even with Q-tips. ♦
CORRECTION: This story has been updated as of May 10 to reflect the correct number of artists working at Tiger Tattoo, the location where Duffy Moon Foster was first employed as a tattoo artist, and the schedule for Tiger Tattoo's Flash Friday promotion.
