Dogstar Tattoo Company is the vision of Kathryn Moore, the owner of the shop. After working in another shop, Kathryn decided to open Dogstar in May 1997. Opening the “right kind of place” she had in mind was not an easy task. Tattoo parlors don’t exactly have the kind of reputation other businesses want nearby. After driving around Durham for four months she finally found a space on Ninth Street. Ninth Street benefits from the college vibe provided by Duke University, so its filled with unusual shops and eateries that make a tattoo studio a lot less conspicuous than it would be in the local suburban strip mall.

Kathryn has a BFA in Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh concentrating in sculpture. Then she went to Flight School with ComAir and got her CFI flight instructor certificate and came back to the Durham area and started teaching. She taught for about a year and was starving to death thanks to her student loans.

“A good friend, Annie, knew the owners of the shop where I apprenticed. Unfortunately I didn’t have a very structured apprenticeship and I began tattooing six days after I arrived. For the most part I learned as I went along. Fortunately there was a decent artist at the shop, Danny McNeal, who I could learn from. I started out with very small pieces and worked towards larger, custom pieces. Pretty quickly I discovered that realism was going to be the easiest style for me to pursue because of my foundation training from Carnegie Mellon.”

“So I kind of fell into tattooing; it wasn’t my planned career choice. But I quickly discovered how much I loved the work. It wasn’t long after starting that I felt I wanted to work independently, creating as professional a shop as possible. I noticed that tattooing, like so many other “rebellious” cultures, was becoming more interesting to the mainstream and I knew that a professional, clean, attractive shop in a positive, upstanding area could do extremely well. With that in mind I began looking for the best spot to achieve my vision and the best name to capture the idea of tattooing I wanted to express in my shop. Naming a shop is like naming your child, it takes a lot of searching and consideration. I wanted to avoid the ink-this/ink-that type of name. I wanted the name to convey more complexity … a name that expressed my interests … outside of tattooing. That’s when, in the midst of my reading passion of Robert Anton Wilson, I decided on the name Dogstar. Wilson, in his writings–an internal dialogue, stream-of-consciouness style–describes the Dogon tribe that verbally passed down specific information regarding a star that wasn’t “discovered” by the modern world until the 1970′s. Their explanation was that a being from the star came and told them where it was. The star marks the home of celestial beings that know the illumination of the universe. People searching for inner and worldly understanding of the the universe and their place in it would “look” for the Dogstar for guidance and direction.”

“The people who envision a tattoo as an expression of the inner search or understanding, their connection to the universe, will hopefully discover that this shop has been opened to allow that search and expression to emerge through the tattoos produced by our artists. So if you discover your inner path and want to immortalize it in a visual representation on the surface of your skin, you will find, at Dogstar, a place that will help you realize your vision.”

Kathryn Moore