Tim Goodrich

Tim Goodrich doesn't talk about himself the way most artists with his résumé do. Ask him about thirty-plus years in the chair, two generations of family in the trade, the four studios under his management at the peak of Aloha Tattoo, and the answer is usually a half-shrug and a redirect: "The work speaks. Anything I say is just talk." Then he hands you a binder of references — Sailor Jerry plates, Japanese chrysanthemum studies, photographs of pieces he tattooed in the 1990s that still hold up today — and gets back to drawing.

That's the discipline. It's also the lineage. Tim came up the way American tattooers used to come up — through a real apprenticeship, in a real street shop, where you swept the floors before you touched a machine. His father was a tattooer. The Marine Corps was the middle chapter — Tim served, and the influence sticks: a code of personal responsibility about doing the job right, showing up when you said you'd show up, and treating the client like family. It's the same code that, twenty years later, would let him walk into a Hilton boardroom and explain why a tattoo shop belonged on hotel property.

The Hilton Conversation

The story of Aloha Tattoo at Hilton Hawaiian Village is the story of Tim. In the early 2000s, the idea of putting a tattoo studio inside one of Waikiki's biggest hotels was — for most operators — laughable. Tattoo shops belonged on side streets, not in resort lobbies. Aloha Tattoo became the first one to land that contract anyway. It worked because Tim showed up looking and sounding like the kind of professional that hotel management already knew how to do business with — a Marine, a small-business owner, a man who could explain in plain language how he intended to keep the studio clean, the artists licensed, the guest experience consistent with the property's brand. The Hilton studio opened. It's still there. It changed what a "tourist tattoo" could be in Waikiki — overnight.

That credential opened the door to a second Aloha location, a Kailua studio, and a network of artists who wanted to work somewhere that respected both the craft and the business of tattooing. Tim built rooms where you could do a $200 walk-in flash piece on a tourist's first night in Waikiki, or a $4,000 multi-session Japanese sleeve for a kamaʻāina who'd been planning it for a year — and you could do both well, in the same week, in the same chair.

The styles he carries

Tim is a generalist in the old sense of the word — meaning, he draws everything well rather than only one thing brilliantly. The portfolio runs across:

• American Traditional. Bold black outlines, flat planes of color, the classics of the Sailor-Jerry/Bert Grimm-era flash wall. Eagles, panthers, daggers, anchors, roses, pin-ups. The work that built the trade and still reads from across the room. Tim's traditional work is among the cleanest in Hawaiʻi — the kind that ages like a 1970s muscle car.
• Japanese Wabori. The classical Japanese style: dragons coiling the bicep, koi climbing the calf, hannya masks in red-and-black wabori frames, chrysanthemum chest panels with wind bars and wave backgrounds. Tim's Japanese work draws on years of study of the genre — the body-flow placement, the negative-space rules, the color discipline — adapted to his own clean linework.
• Black & Grey. Soft smoke shading and hard solid blacks, from realism-adjacent portraits to full back pieces. His black-and-grey full back of an eagle, clipper ship, anchor, and low-back rose is the kind of multi-session commitment piece that defines a body.
• Fine Line. The detail end of the spectrum — delicate single-needle work, small commemorative pieces, ornament-as-tattoo. Tim's fine line is technically tight because his traditional drawing chops give him the underlying structure first.

And if you ask him which one is his favorite, he'll tell you "whatever the client actually wants done right."

Why he still does walk-ins

Tim could, easily, run an appointment-only book at this point in his career. Most tattooers with three decades of clean work behind them do. He doesn't. Walk-ins are still on the menu — Tim's Hilton studio is one of the few places in Waikiki where you can stop by on a Tuesday night, point at the flash wall, sit down within an hour and walk out with a piece tattooed by someone who's been doing it longer than you've been alive.

The reason is partly economic — walk-in tourism is the lifeblood of a Waikiki shop, and Tim built his business model around it. But the bigger reason is craft. Walk-in flash, done well, is the test environment for everything else. It's where the linework gets sharp because it has to land in forty-five minutes. It's where the color decisions get fast because the client is sitting right there waiting. And it's where the muscle memory keeps for the bigger work that comes through the door the next morning. Tim still does walk-ins because Tim still wants to be tattooing at the level he tattooed at twenty years from now — and the walk-in chair is the gym.

The cover-up nobody else will touch

Every shop in Waikiki has the same kind of client occasionally — someone with a piece that was rushed, a piece that healed badly, a piece they regret. The phone gets passed around. The other shops say no. The piece is too dark, too big, too placed-on-a-difficult-spot. Eventually someone says "call Tim."

Cover-ups are the technical hard mode of tattooing. You're working over a saturation level that the previous artist already laid down, with line placement that has to mathematically swallow whatever's underneath, in a composition that has to read as its own piece — not as "a cover-up." Tim has built thirty years of vocabulary for that problem: the black-and-grey solutions, the bold-traditional solutions, the Japanese-piece-built-around-the-bad-element solutions. Some of his best work in the portfolio started as something he had to bury.

How to book Tim

Tim takes appointments and walk-ins out of both Aloha Tattoo (at Hilton Hawaiian Village and Kailua) and Wailana Tattoo (his Waikiki residency). The fastest path is the same as it's been for thirty years: text or call ahead, send a reference image and your placement, and ask when the chair is open.

Further reading

• The Aloha Tattoo Story — how the first hotel-grounds tattoo shop in Hawaiʻi got approved
• The American Traditional style guide
• The Japanese Wabori style guide
• Aloha Tattoo — shop profile