Wailana Tattoo

If Ohana is the network's street shop, Wailana is its workshop. The model is different: fewer walk-ins, more long-form custom work, an appointment book that respects the patience that color realism and full-color Traditional require. Wailana is where you go when you want a piece that takes more than an evening to build — and where you go if you're an artist looking to commission a custom hand-wound coil machine for your own kit.

The roster

• 2bit (Chris Curren) — Color Realism specialist, American Traditional, professional piercing. Apprenticed under JD Gray at Sacred Art. 15+ years.
• Franky Sharpz — custom coil tattoo machine builder + American Traditional, Polynesian, color-realism artist.

Tim Goodrich also takes appointments through Wailana — a third generational specialist working out of the same room.

What Wailana does best

Color Realism is the headline specialty. Photographic-likeness tattoos are not a Tuesday-afternoon walk-in — they're multi-session, patience-intensive, and require an artist who knows how to lay color over color in a way that will hold its photographic clarity a decade later. 2bit's portfolio is the proof. Sea turtles, hibiscus, Hawaiian florals, portraits — rendered with the saturation discipline that separates serious color realism from the broader "colorful tattoo" category.

Machine building is the other headline. Franky's coil machines live in shop drawers across the West Coast and the Pacific. They are commissioned, custom-tuned, and named — the artist who's going to use the machine weighs in on the build. (See Franky's feature for the workshop deep-dive.)

Other Wailana specialties: American Traditional, Polynesian tribal silhouettes, watercolor-medium experiments, and the long-form B&G work (full back pieces, half sleeves, large memorial compositions) that doesn't fit a walk-in schedule.

How to book Wailana