Kari Barba

Kari Barba (born July 10, 1960, in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American tattoo artist and painter widely recognized as one of the most awarded tattooers in the craft's history and a pioneering woman in a field long dominated by men. A lifelong artist who had never seen a tattoo until her late teens, she began tattooing in 1979 at the age of nineteen and moved to California the following year to pursue it full time, opening her first shop, Twilight Fantasy, in Anaheim in 1983, the business that grew into Outer Limits Tattoo. Known for illustrative realism and counted among the first artists to work in color realism, she began entering competitions in 1985 and went on to win more than five hundred awards, including the National Tattoo Association's Tattooist of the Year in 1987. From her earliest days she hired and championed female tattooers and was among the first in the industry to wear gloves and wrap her equipment, helping establish the sterile standards now considered basic practice. In 2002 she acquired the historic Long Beach shop originally opened by Bert Grimm, in continuous operation as a tattoo shop since 1927 and regarded as the oldest in the United States, which she co-owns and runs as Outer Limits Tattoo alongside a museum preserving the history of the Pike; now based in Long Beach, she remains an active artist, exhibitor, and mentor, with her granddaughter Mia Barba as her final apprentice.