Liverpool's first fully licensed tattoo bar, by the venue's own account

An archived news post on INK's own site, found among entries the Wayback Machine dates to around 2016, opens with: So after 9 months, many permanent and temporary tattoo dates, and lots of back and forth with the local council we have been granted a full tattoo license. The post goes on to call the venue Liverpool's first fully licensed tattoo bar, a claim made about the city, not just about the venue's own history.

None of wave one's ten notes touch this subject at all; wave one's sources were the tables, private-hire, dress-code and Mile High pages, not this older blog entry. This note stays with the tattoo-licence story specifically.

Nine months, by the post's own count

The post frames nine months as the length of the process from the venue's earlier tattoo activity, described as many permanent and temporary tattoo dates, through to the council finally granting a full licence. It credits lots of back and forth with the local council as the reason the process took that long, without naming a specific council department or official.

A separate archived post, covered in a companion note in this wave on INK's own account of its early years, independently mentions adding a fully licensed tattoo station in the same breath as a VIP area upgrade, describing both as happening after an unbelievable 9 months at Ink. The same nine-month figure appears in both posts, for what reads as the same underlying event, which is the strongest cross-check this note has for the timeline.

Temporary tattoo dates, the phrase the post uses for the earlier activity, reads as a series of guest-artist sessions rather than a permanent chair, which the post treats as a different, lesser arrangement from the full licence it goes on to describe.

What the licence actually permitted

The post explains the practical meaning of the licence in its own words: We can now open up our chair to fully licensed and insured tattoo artists that hold the correct license with Liverpool city council. That is a specific operational detail, not a vague claim of being tattoo-friendly: a chair, available to artists who themselves separately hold a council licence.

The post does not name an individual tattoo artist, a shop name operating the chair, or a date range for how long the chair stayed available at the venue. Those specifics, if they exist anywhere in the archive, are not on this page.

A chair, singular, is the unit of capacity the post describes, which suggests a single working station rather than a multi-artist studio operating inside the venue, though the post does not explicitly rule out more than one artist working the same chair on a rota. Fully licensed and insured is the standard the post sets for any artist using the chair, language that reads as a condition the venue imposed rather than simply a legal minimum it had to repeat.

"Liverpool's first" as a claim about the city

The post's own line, Liverpool's first fully licensed tattoo bar, extends the claim beyond INK's own history to a statement about every other bar in the city at that point. This note has not checked that claim against any outside record of Liverpool licensing history, and it is reported here exactly as the venue's own self-description, not as an independently verified fact.

A reader who only knew INK from its table packages and dress code, the material wave one's ten notes draw on, would have no reason to expect a tattoo chair ever operated inside the same room as the bottle service and the VIP bookings.

No competing bar is named as a near-miss or a runner-up for this claim; the post presents it as a settled fact about INK's own place in the city's bar history rather than as a comparison against a named rival. A claim made this plainly, with no hedge such as "one of the first" or "among the first," is either straightforwardly true or straightforwardly wrong, with no middle ground the post itself allows for.

A nightclub running two different kinds of business

Night-time hospitality and a licensed tattoo chair are not an obvious pairing, which is part of why this post stood out among the blog's other entries read for this wave. The same post that describes the tattoo licence sits in a list alongside posts about VIP upgrades, Halloween parties and a club birthday, with no separate section marking it out as a different kind of announcement.

Whether the tattoo chair ran on the same nights as the club's RnB and house programming, covered from a different page in a separate note in this wave, or on separate daytime hours, is not stated in the post this note has read. The archive does not resolve that detail either way. Both activities sharing one roof, regardless of exact hours, is itself the notable fact this note is built around, whatever the precise scheduling turned out to be. A venue built around VIP tables and bottle service finding room for a licensed tattoo chair says something about how varied its early offering was, beyond the drinks and door policy wave one's own notes describe.

Where this leaves a visitor reading the archive today

This is a piece of INK's own documented history, not a current service; nothing on this wave's archived pages indicates whether a tattoo chair is still part of the venue. The claim is treated here exactly as the 2016-dated post states it, Liverpool's first fully licensed tattoo bar, with the nine-month licensing process as the venue's own account of how it got there.

A group planning a night out from a Lancashire hotel is unlikely to find a working tattoo chair at INK tonight on the strength of an old blog post, but the post itself is a genuine piece of the venue's documented past, printed in its own words at the time, and a different kind of fact from the table packages covered elsewhere in this wave. It rounds out a picture of a venue that, in its own early years, tried more than one way of filling the room, alongside the VIP tables, the Terrace and the named weekly nights that make up most of this project's other notes. A later note picks this same chair back up, asking what kind of stay would have been needed to use it alongside a night at the club.

Questions

How long did the tattoo-licence process take, by the venue's own account?

Nine months, from earlier tattoo dates through to the council granting a full licence, per the archived post's own opening line.

What did the licence specifically permit?

Opening the venue's own chair to tattoo artists who themselves held a separate, correct licence with Liverpool City Council.

Does another archived post support the nine-month figure?

Yes. A separate post on INK's early years also uses "after an unbelievable 9 months" to describe the same period, naming the tattoo station alongside a VIP upgrade.