Article by Jens Mikkelsen, Photo by Jens Mikkelsen
ST CLOUD, Minn. — On the corner of a plain street in St. Cloud sits a purple house that jumps out from a distance. Inside, you will find Purple Pain Tattoo Studio and its owner, Eric Cagle. Eric has been tattooing since 1999.
According to a 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center, 32 percent of Americans have at least one tattoo, 22 percent have more than one, and 80 percent think society has become more accepting of tattoos. But Cagle’s studio is doing more than tapping into a trend.
Several things make Purple Pain unique, starting with its name.
“Purple is a healing color, and pain, of course, is what you feel when you do a tattoo. So, too, some people get, I won’t say pleasure, but like therapy from tattoos. You get that pleasure with the pain or that therapy with the pain, that healing with the pain.”
Cagle is also a huge Prince fan, so appropriate to the name, the studio, which opened in 2017, is also filled with Prince memorabilia and hundreds of other collectors’ items.
“I’ve always been into collecting, like comic books, sci-fi, Star Wars… I’ve always been a nerd. Most artists are nerds. If you go into their shop they will have some form of nerddom in their realm. I mean we’re all cut from the same cloth,” said Cagle.
But Cagle didn’t start out wanting to be a tattoo artist,
“I was doing graphic design stuff for a shop in town and I was getting tattooed by them, but then as they got to know me and they were getting bigger, they were like we need another tattoo artist and we think you would be good. And I’m like, I don’t know if I can tattoo, you know, I can draw but that doesn’t mean I can tattoo.”
However, his graphic design background did prove to come in handy,
“A lot of times, it’s the composition. Like you put things together to make it flow on skin. Same way if you were to do an advertisement, you want it to flow.”
Even Cagle’s collecting ended up being useful in setting his shop apart,
“I put up stuff so that people are, I’ll say, stimulated. When you are getting a tattoo, of course, there’s pain. But sometimes, if you have stuff to look at and distractions, it also helps with that. Plus, it makes for good conversation. People are like ‘oh that’s cool’ then they pretty [much] forget that you’re actually getting a tattoo, or all of a sudden the tattoo is done.”
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