Franky Sharpz

Most tattoo artists buy their machines. They pick a brand they trust, they swap out the tubes and grips on schedule, and they don't think about the iron between sessions. Franky Sharpz is one of the small number of working tattoo artists in the world who builds the machines themselves — hand-wound coils, custom frames, the kind of one-of-one iron that gets named and traded between artists who know what to look for.

The machine building is half of the story. The other half is the tattooing — Franky is a working American Traditional, Polynesian, and color-realism artist at Wailana Tattoo, and the portfolio backs it up. But the machines deserve their own paragraph because they're the rare technical specialty that puts an artist on a different map.

Hand-wound coils, in 2026

Coil tattoo machines are the original tattoo machines — invented in the early 20th century, refined across the next hundred years, gradually displaced by rotary machines (smaller, lighter, easier to maintain) in modern shops. Coils are now a specialist's tool. They're heavier. They hum. They need tuning. They demand a specific kind of hand to use them well. And, for the artists who prefer them, they put down ink in a way nothing else quite matches — particularly for traditional linework and color packing.

Franky builds them. Hand-wound liners, shaders, and color packers. The frames are custom-machined; the coils are wound by hand to the specific resistance the artist wants; each machine is tuned to a specific application — a liner machine for crisp Traditional outlines, a shader for soft B&G transitions, a color packer for fast saturation on Traditional flash. The output isn't mass-produced; it's commissioned, with the artist who's going to use it weighing in on the build.

The customer base is small and obsessive: working tattoo artists who care enough about their tools to seek out custom builds. Franky's iron lives in shop drawers all over the West Coast and the Pacific, named and labeled, often used as the first machine reached for when the artist wants the linework or color pack to come out right.

The tattoo portfolio

Franky's own tattooing benefits from his deep understanding of the equipment. The portfolio runs across:

• A nurse helmet over a red cross with a rose — saturated American Traditional with a surreal Saturn floating above the figure. Pure Traditional drawing with a science-fiction punchline.
• A black-and-grey shark-and-manta-ray duo on a forearm — soft splash background, anatomically right, quietly minimal.
• An anatomical heart with rose on a bicep — medical-illustration accuracy in soft black-and-grey whip shading.
• A black-and-grey street lantern with reaching skeletal figures — surrealist dark art climbing an upper arm.
• A Polynesian honu with patterned shell on a forearm — solid blacks, geometric pattern density inside the shell, drawn to body contour.
• A melting Dalí-style clock on a forearm — surrealist tribute, all black-and-grey, art-history-coded.
• A watercolor Louisiana state silhouette on the back of a hand — geographic memorial, soft sunrise gradient.
• A traditional king cobra rising in S-curve down a calf — saturated green-and-red Traditional execution.

The range tells you something about Franky's relationship with the trade: he's not interested in being the best at one thing. He's interested in being technically capable across the styles that actually get requested in a working Waikiki shop, and using the deep equipment knowledge to make sure each style comes out the way the iron was built to deliver it.

Why Wailana

Wailana is the technical workshop of the Waikiki network — the room where the machine-building happens in the back, the color realism happens in the front (2bit's chair), and the schedule is built around clients who want long-form custom work rather than walk-in flash volume. Franky's hybrid practice (machine building + tattooing) fits Wailana's workshop culture perfectly. The shop respects the time the machines take. The artists in the building benefit directly — many of them tattoo with Franky's iron when they want a specific feel.

How to book Franky — or commission a machine

Further reading

• Wailana Tattoo — shop profile
• 2bit — Wailana's other technical lead
• The American Traditional style guide
• The Polynesian Tribal style guide