The popular live tattoo booth that inked some 30 people at last month’s TechCrunch Disrupt convention at Moscone West did not have the proper permits to operate, Gazetteer SF has learned.
Renette Hammer, the 33-year-old owner of Mirage Tattoo in Hayes Valley who was contracted by the New York-based tattoo marketplace app Tattd to run the booth, says she received a call from the San Francisco Department of Public Health on Oct. 29, right after she got home from the final day of Disrupt. She said the inspector explained that the Department had just received the paperwork that day, that they were retroactively denying the request, and she had just unwittingly worked an illegal event.
Hammer was hired by Tattd founder Laura Schaack to run the booth and tattoo as many attendees as possible throughout the three-day event. As a contractor, Hammer was not responsible for acquiring the proper permits for the live tattoo studio Tattd set up at Disrupt, but she was not surprised something was not above board.
“There were no sinks” on the expo floor, Hammer said, “so we couldn’t even wash our hands between clients. We just kept changing our gloves.”
There indeed were no sinks anywhere near the booth at Disrupt, increasing the risk of the pop-up accidentally spreading bloodborne pathogens.
When I interviewed Schaack during the expo, she mentioned the permits unprompted, in an anecdote to show how popular the pop-up had become: “Security will walk up and I get really nervous. I’m like, ‘We have our licensing, we have our permits!’ But then they just want a tattoo,” she told me at the time.
After the Health Department call, Hammer contacted Schaack right away. Schaack, who is not a tattoo artist, replied that she had thought she only needed to submit a permit request to the City and that she was unaware it needed to be approved. “She seemed really naive,” Hammer said.
Michael Schick, an event coordinator for TechCrunch, told me that TechCrunch was excited to host the live tattoo studio as long as “she met the terms set by the venue and the laws set by the City of San Francisco for tattooing.”
“These conditions were sent to [Schaack] multiple times,” Schick said.
On Oct. 30, Schaack told Hammer via audio message she had spoken with the Department and taken full responsibility. In the voice note, Schaack said she believed the inspector reviewing Tattd’s paperwork was going to “turn a blind eye on this one” due to Hammer’s good reputation with the Health Department, with which Hammer worked closely while she prepared to open Mirage last summer.
Still, Hammer endured two weeks of frustrating back-and-forth with Schaack in order to collect her $3,750 fee. On Nov. 7, Hammer posted to her Instagram story saying she had been “ghosted” by Tattd, after which Schaack sent Hammer a nondisclosure agreement, which has been viewed by Gazetteer SF, asking her to sign it in order to be paid.
“She doesn’t want me to tell the media that she had this event illegally, because as an app for tattoo artists, what are you doing holding an event and putting me and my business at risk?” Hammer said. “It’s crazy. You’re coming to the city, coming from New York, you hire a local artist and then you screw them over?”
Hammer received payment from Tattd yesterday evening while Gazetteer SF was still reporting this story. (Screenshots of bank transfers confirm this.)
Schaack said “the payment transfer was already in process when [Hammer] began posting inaccurate statements online… Because of that, we asked her to sign some standard paperwork.”
As for the permit, Schaack said the paperwork was “completed in full,” but did not specify if it was approved or denied by the City.
The San Francisco Department of Public Health did not respond to Gazetteer SF’s request for comment in time for publication.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the timing of Tattd’s wire transfer to Hammer. Tattd sent full payment to Hammer before a reporter reached out to the company and TechCrunch about it. This story has also been updated to remove a description of an attendee's tattoo.
