OLD SCHOOL EVERYWHERE EXCEPT THE paperwork.
Josiah Dodge bought a shop with one of the worst reputations in Rhode Island and spent a decade turning it into one of the best. His manager, Tony Asian, still books clients by phone because a client should be able to just call. The one thing they were happy to give up was the paper.
A six-person shop on East Avenue.
Irish Rose Tattoo sits on East Avenue in Westerly, Rhode Island. Six people work there.
Josiah Dodge owns it. He came to tattooing sideways, out of a paint and body shop, on a dare.
"My ex-wife bet me I could tattoo. I was already well tattooed by then — I did paint and body work. I told her she was stoned. Then I came home and she had gone on Craigslist and traded for a machine and a power supply. Went up to the supply place with another local artist to get sterile stuff, and did one on her. Then the neighbor saw it and asked if I wanted to do more, and away we went. Completely self-taught. That was 2006-ish."
Josiah Dodge, Owner
Tony Asian manages the shop — most clients know him that way, though his full name is Tony Nguyen. His start was even simpler.
"I just didn't want to pay for tattoos, so I started doing them."
Tony Asian, Manager
Between them they run a shop that is deliberately old-fashioned about the things that matter to clients, and completely paperless about everything else. Here is how both of those are true at the same time.
A shop nobody wanted.
Josiah did not go looking to own a shop. In 2013 a guy in Cranston offered him one, and his first instinct was no.
"It probably had one of the worst reputations in Rhode Island at the time."
Josiah Dodge
He went up on a Monday night to look at it anyway. The tattoo side was a mess, but the piercing side was busy enough to carry the bills while they fixed the rest.
"This is kind of weird, but we could use the piercing volume just to pay the bills while we fix the tattoo side of things."
Josiah Dodge
He and a close friend bought it. Within a few months the other shops in the area had noticed things had changed. That took years, not months, and it is the part Josiah is proudest of. Irish Rose opened in Westerly in 2022 and has been in the same location ever since.
"As far as our reputation goes, that's changed a lot from when I first bought the shop. We probably have the highest-rated shop in the area, I think."
Josiah Dodge
The paper years.
Ask either of them what the shop ran on before, and you get the same two words: a lot of paper.
Rhode Island requires a consent form for every single visit, kept on file for five years. For a shop doing serious piercing volume, that is not a filing cabinet. It is a storage problem with a deadline.
"The shop in Cranston, we would do three to five thousand piercings a year. Every visit's a consent form. The state of Rhode Island says you have to store it for five years. So I would literally have those Staples file boxes jam-filled in two and a half months."
Josiah Dodge
They went in the basement, in the cold corner nobody liked going into.
The storage was only half of it. Every form meant a printed sheet and a photocopy of the client's ID on the back, which meant ink, toner, and a bulk print run at Staples that was never free. And for a stretch, the state wanted every client written into a ledger by hand as well.
"I've gotten past the point of going into a dedicated notebook and writing down every client's name, ID number, date of birth, and address in a book, and what they got done. Take the stack of consent forms at the end of the day and handwrite it into a ledger. There's days we do over fifty piercings. That's fifty consent forms, and I have to write them in a book?"
Josiah Dodge
Irish Rose started using Tattoo Studio Pro before the move to their current shop in Westerly.
The switch away, and the switch back.
There was a stretch where they left. Tattoo Studio Pro shipped a major redesign, and the transition was rough on the less tech-friendly half of the shop. The change also pushed Irish Rose off the old plan they had been on since the start. Tony tried something else.
"We switched over to another one briefly, but that was kind of a mess, so we came back."
Tony Asian
What brought them back was not a feature. It was how little the thing asked of a client standing in the shop waiting to get tattooed: the convenience and ease of use.
"There was a pile of glitches, and it just seemed very cumbersome to use. I don't need this much information from people. It's a consent form and a waiver. It shouldn't be who's your grandfather, where'd they come from, what nationality. That's crazy."
Josiah Dodge
What they will not change: booking.
Here is what makes Irish Rose worth writing about. They did not adopt software to run the shop. They adopted it to kill the paperwork, and left everything that makes them themselves exactly where it was.
Nobody at Irish Rose books through a portal. That is a decision, not an oversight.
"I have this really old-school thing where if you want an appointment, just reach out to us. I've walked into shops where my friends work and had work done, and it's yeah, come in on this day, go see the front desk and tell them you have an appointment. Why? Why can't I just hit you up and say I want to come in on this day? Why do we need this extra level of separation?"
Josiah Dodge
Tony sees it from the client's side of the counter.
"I feel like the clients appreciate that interaction more than interacting with a third party. It feels more personal."
Tony Asian
There is a practical argument too, which anyone who has read a booking request will recognize.
"It also gives us a chance to say, hey, what are you looking at, what do you want to do, rather than just getting a note that says I have an appointment on Friday at three for a medium-sized something. I'm a big dude. What's medium to you might not be medium to me."
Josiah Dodge
Tony's favorite version of that request, for the record: about the size of two packs of Newports.
A busy day at Irish Rose now.
All six people in the shop use the app, on a shared shop iPad and on their own devices.
"There's one singular shop iPad that everyone uses to sign in, and then we kind of just hand out our iPads for them to fill it out."
Tony Asian
The client fills out their own consent and waiver, signs, and goes into the queue. The artist gets on with setting up.
"You're not babysitting the person. They fill it out, and you can go do what you've got to do, and come back."
Josiah Dodge
On the heavy days that is the difference between going home and staying late.
"There's some days where if we were doing actual paperwork, we'd be there for hours, literally. I'll do ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen people in a day. At the end of the day, I'm not sitting there writing out a bunch of stuff."
Josiah Dodge
And the records that used to live in basement boxes are now a search.
"Being able to have it on a PDF and just have the Department of Health show up and say, we need your consent forms from this date range, and we can go in and say, here you go, there it is."
Josiah Dodge
The money side.
Beyond the forms, the reporting turned into the part Tony leans on.
"I feel like it was easier to keep track of the financial aspect, especially when it comes to us doing our own taxes, and me doing less work when it comes to numbers."
Tony Asian
Josiah, who cheerfully admits he is not the numbers half of this operation, uses it differently.
"He uses it to track it, so he has a rough figure of what he's going to have in taxes. I generally just kind of wing it and go in. And we can put notes on there, so if somebody goes to the store and grabs something for the shop, I make sure everybody gets their money back. We can enter how it was paid and everything else."
Josiah Dodge
Where it earns its keep: conventions.
Irish Rose works shows around the region. Sturbridge, Providence, White Plains. Conventions used to mean hauling consent forms, a printer, and a scanner, and hoping the weather held.
"You hand them an iPad. You don't have to worry about carrying around paper consent forms and having them with you. You go to load out, and it's a one-night show, and it's raining, and now the forms are destroyed. This is easy. It just streamlines everything. It's just your iPad."
Josiah Dodge
Tony puts it more directly.
"You guys came in clutch at the convention."
Tony Asian
A detail Tony appreciates: catching the fakes.
Tony worked doors before he worked a machine, so checking ID is muscle memory. One workflow setting turns off the client-facing ID capture, which forces the ID check to happen in the artist's hands instead of through a client's camera. That is exactly how he already works.
"Especially if it's a fake ID. I used to be a bouncer, so I would check for fake IDs. It's hard to spot taking a picture of it, but physically looking at it, it's easier to spot."
Tony Asian
What they tell other shops.
Josiah is not a natural early adopter, and he says so before you can.
"I'm an if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it kind of guy. My biggest downfall is that if I have something like a computer or an app and it's supposed to work and it doesn't work, I have absolutely no patience. I don't care if it's a welder or the hydraulics on the boat. It's supposed to work. It's a tool."
Josiah Dodge
Which is what makes his recommendation land.
"Anybody that's still spending the time to sit there and go the paper route, as long as it's not a regulatory requirement, they should definitely just give it a shot and see what they think of it. It's really not difficult."
Josiah Dodge
Tony's footnote: it took a while to get him around.
The takeaway.
Irish Rose did not change who they are. They still run on walk-ins, phone calls, and a shop atmosphere they will defend at length.
"We have a very brotherly vibe. We banter a lot, our clients are involved. It's a very homey atmosphere."
Tony Asian
"There's no safe space. We all laugh, we joke, we have fun. It's like an old-school tattoo shop. It's not walk in, dead silent, people with headphones on, ignoring everybody."
Josiah Dodge
"It's like one of those old-school barbershops where everyone just knows everybody, and they're friendly, and they're joking, laughing."
Tony Asian
What changed is everything that used to happen around the tattoo. The Staples boxes in the basement. The ledger. The printer at the convention. The stack of forms at the end of the night. All of it gone, without touching the part that made clients come back in the first place.
A note on where things stand now.
Josiah has since moved to a new area. Irish Rose is now Tony's and his sons' joint venture — a family operation carrying on the same vibe the shop has always had. Josiah still guest spots when he can. The culture he spent a decade building did not leave when he did.
There's some days where if we were doing actual paperwork, we'd be there for hours, literally.