Dark Water founder jogged her way into new tattoo studio space
Nathan Dalton
March 4, 2024
Tattoo artist Katie Mizuno prepares for a tattoo session like an athlete.
She makes sure to get eight hours of sleep on nights before tattooing days, and she takes her hydration seriously — you’ll rarely see her without her 46-ounce Yeti thermos full of ice water.
“She treats it like a sport almost, the way she fuels and rests for her tattooing,” said her husband, Kento Mizuno.
A high school athlete who ran track and was captain of the basketball team, Katie still runs everyday. And it was on one of her daily jogs that she found the space that eventually became Dark Water, a tattoo studio the Mizunos opened in November on San Pablo Avenue.
“I have a bunch of different running routes throughout the Bay Area,” Katie said. “It was a great way of looking at different retail spaces that had ‘for lease’ signs on them, and I happened upon this one.”
The space she happened upon is located next door to Babette, the previous home of Lanesplitter Pizza. Lanesplitter founders, Daniel Rogers and Vic Gumper, who own the building, were working on the space when the Mizunos went to take a closer look. Rogers and Gumper told the couple that they had envisioned a tattoo shop in the space.
“It was too perfect,” Kento said. “The next day, we put down a deposit.”
A video Katie posted on Instagram shows the couple prepping their new space, kicking up dust, clearly exhausted. It’s called, “Watch this couple open their small business … and nearly lose their minds.”
Dark Water opened in November and currently has a roster of six artists, including Katie. Kento, who also works as a designer and photographer, takes care of “everything that’s not tattooing,” including working with contractors to build out the shop, maintaining supplies, artist outreach, and social media.
Katie was born in San Francisco, but grew up in Boulder, Colorado. She studied film production at NYU, which helped her figure out her artistic strengths, and also set the stage for her future as a tattoo artist.
“I did a lot of special effects makeup in film school,” she said, “which kind of helped me learn how to draw on bodies and work with bodies.” New York is also where she got tattooed for the first time.
“A good friend of mine was also getting into tattoos, and we kind of fueled each other’s addiction to it,” said Katie.
After college she lived for a spell in Japan where she taught kindergarten. It’s also where she and Kento first met.
Kento grew up in Japan, but at the time of their meeting was attending design school in the U.S.
“We went on one date in Tokyo, and then did long distance for like six months,” said Kento.
During their time apart, Katie started sharing her drawings with Kento.
“She would send me sketches, and I’d be like, ‘These are really freaking good. Someone who’s talented like you should pursue this,’” said Kento.
Katie couldn’t imagine making a living as an artist, it seemed too far-fetched, but Kento had planted a seed. “Once the idea was planted in my head it grew and grew until I realized I didn’t want to do anything else,” said Katie.
So she set out to learn how to tattoo, and did so the hard way, by tattooing on herself.
“Katie tattooed her whole legs and she was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to ask someone else to sacrifice their skin to learn how to do this,” said Kento.
Geometric Suminagashi Floral Arm Sleeve tattoo by Katie Mizuno of Dark Water. Courtesy: Kento Mizuno/Dark Water
Some of the tattoos were not so great, but some of them were good. And the good ones eventually got her hired at a tattoo shop in San Francisco.
Over the next eight years she worked at “a ton of different shops,” including stints in Pendleton, South Carolina, and Austin, Texas, where she honed her skills and learned about the industry.
Through it all she always had the goal of opening her own shop.
Katie likes to do large tattoos. Full arm sleeves, large back pieces, bodysuits. Her signature style is “suminagashi,” which translates into “ink flow.”
“Like flowing lines that influence each other,” she said. “There’s like a push and pull motion to it. It’s a very water-like texture, which also kind of made sense with the naming of the shop.”
Other artists at the shop specialize in smaller, fine-line pieces.
Those different styles are spotlighted in a video Katie created for Instagram, where she and a co-worker, who work in completely different styles, have a tattoo-gun stand-off while the theme for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” plays. They glare at each other before breaking into smiles and blowing kisses across the studio.
“Those videos are like my film degree being put to work,” she said.
Other videos range from the informative (“My favorite topics on tattoo history”), to the absurd (“Do I dare show my feet on social media again?”), to the poignant (“3 things tattoo artists know to be true: 1. Literally everyone has stretch marks, 2. Self harm scars are extremely common, 3. Societal standards of beauty are overrated”).
“I would like people to find those videos and see my work and think to themselves, ‘I wonder if I could sit through it and become more curious about the process and also feel a little bit more accepted,’” Katie said. “I tattoo all body types, all skin tones, so I would hope that people would feel more invited into the process by seeing those videos and relating to them.”
Dark Water, 2035 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley. Hours: Daily, 12 p.m.-7 p.m. Connect via Instagram.
Original Piece by Nathan Dalton - Berkeleyside
