At the end of every night at last October’s Country Thunder Festival, Enchanted Dragon Tattoos owner Victor Tackett had six notebook pages of names and phone numbers from people he and his five tattoo artists were not able to get to.
“It was that busy,” he said.
This weekend, he is doubling his staff and presence at the four-day festival; a dozen artists will man two makeshift tattoo studios housed in 20-foot shipping containers set up along either side of the main stage.
This will be the Tucson shop’s third festival. They introduced themselves at the 2019 event in Florence and returned last October.
“We are super excited to go back, but it feels like we just did it,” said Tackett, who with brothers Jason and Robert have three Tucson Enchanted Dragon locations, one in Sierra Vista and a fifth in Missouri. “We saw a lot of people last year who we had tattooed in 2019.”
Tackett does not have an accurate count of how many tattoos they did at Country Thunder, but he said they were busy from the time they opened in the late morning to well past the final act taking the main stage at night. The most popular tattoo: The steer horns from the festival’s logo.
“We did cowboy boots and spurs and cowboy hats, all kinds of Western things,” said Tackett, whose family opened Enchanted Dragon in 1984. “We’ll tattoo whatever people want. They AirDrop us a photo and we go from there.”
In addition to tattoos, Enchanted Dragon also does piercings.
The 2022 Country Thunder Arizona festival is Thursday, April 7, to Sunday, April 10, in Florence. For tickets and more information, visit countrythunder.com/az.
You're at the biggest music festival in the state. Why not get a tattoo? Kenneth Deets Jr. tattooed the Browning Rifle Co. emblem on Tucsonan Jonathon Lewis's forearm on Thursday, April 7, the opening day of the four-day country music festival in Florence. (Warning: adult language)
