BRADY FLANIGANStaff Writer

“The lymphatic system,” said the man leaning over the counter, “filters all the toxins away from everything and secretes them to your liver and kidneys. God made that move. Just like God made all the plants to aid that stuff. It’s all a puzzle, man.” He was wearing black latex gloves—Jesus on the cross tattooed on his forearm. 

Behind the counter a woman nodded along as she absently rubbed the belly of a baby curled-up beside her in a cardboard box. A skinny hospital smell drifted from down a hallway. Rubbing alcohol and latex. Something was buzzing from down there, an electric whine like a dying alternator in an old Lincoln. Like wasps trapped in a Coke bottle. It all felt like stumbling into a sermon in a bayou town where the preacher was the doctor by lunch and the embalmer by dinner. 

The man turned away from the counter. “You’ve met Britt, right? She’s one of the great artists here at Hard Rock Studios.” Britt looked up and whispered hello.

That’s Jeremy Zimmerman. He and his wife Lenzi Zimmerman run Hard Rock Tattoo Studio on North Jackson Street. Hard Rock is a place with a glowing turquoise lobby. A black couch pushed against a glass exterior-wall and all the world’s light shining in. A bright place where the display cases have no dust, and the pen on the counter never smears. In another world it could’ve been a pediatrician’s office.

Some imaginations need an oil change—imaginations driving on burnt up originality, where tattoo shops are still on the other side of town—where the light poles flicker, and everything smells of Steel Reserve and Camels. A place where tattooists needle away on bikers with skin as tough as a rider’s jacket. If that sort of place is out there, Hard Rock isn’t it.  

Instead there’s Jeremy clutching a non-alcoholic Corona, looks of a bouncer with the attitude of a Buddha—a dude who talks about art like it’s God’s own Rubik’s Cube. His wife Lenzi, standing quiet but confident in the background, a tattoo artist specializing in permanent makeup, restoring lost eyebrows and reviving faded lips—the guardrails of the shop. There’s Britt Ritchie, the church-camp counselor, a daycare worker in a past life, short with dark hair and a voice like a butterfly. Joshua Small toiling away in his room, walls covered in monochromatic murals of every rapper from Notorious B.I.G to Eminem. There’s Payton Seagroves and Lonny Thompson off somewhere, poking a hole through the ear of a Vanderbilt Tullahoma-Harton nurse. And there’s Hollywood, a tall woman with eyes serious enough to cut through sandstorms. They’re an orchestra of artists with ink instruments, dancing around Hard Rock to a tune that’s theirs and nobody else’s. 

Jeremy speaks like a man who was an artist in the birth canal. “At three years old my mom took me to a doctor’s appointment, and I was screaming and crying in the lobby. She thought a kid hit me,” he said. “She asked what happened, and I was like, ‘there’s pink-color outside of the lines on my coloring book.’” An artist with an outlaw’s outlet, he used up his teens painting buddies’ denim jackets and lurking through town at night—graffiti on his mind. “ I actually got in trouble for spray painting some buildings around town, and did 400 hours public service.” But there wasn’t much regret in his voice. Jeremy is a pious man; he sees God carried on the wind. Every time a leaf falls on the concrete, it’s just another dab of ink added to God’s ongoing mural. Every breath is a lesson.

In his twenties he left Tullahoma for Nashville. He wanted an art studio, but he was drowned out by the hum of Music City, and he found a gig as a caricature artist at Opryland. Working there was like waking up to a bucket of ice water: “all of a sudden I was humbled. Out of the 20 artists there, I sucked. And I was already told I was a great artist from Tullahoma. I learned right then that the word art is not spelled E-G-O.” 

He spent the next twenty years running a construction company. “ I would design these beautiful decks, and then I would present them. Sometimes they would say no, and sometimes they’d write me a $20,000 check. But it just wasn’t the artist I was trying to be.” 

So he found his way to the Tullahoma Fine Arts Center. “My thing was to give art to the underprivileged kids in our community.  If these kids had an outlet like art they could learn that they’re good at something, he said. “It would give them some sense of self-worth, or show them that they had a talent they could nurture, and it would give them an identity.” 

Like most stories worth telling, the next big shift in Jeremy’s life came on the heels of violence. His cousin had just been inked by some drunken scratcher with an Amazon tattoo gun. If Jeremy couldn’t cover up the mistake, this home-cooked tattooist would bleed for it. So Jeremy did, and that little success was the spark to an acetylene torch—hooked. Time and effort later, and he was running Hard Rock. While Jeremy’s highway to Hard Rock wandered through caricatures and construction, Britt found hers in a hardwood church pew. 

Britt grew up in Decherd, a child of Franklin County High. Like Jeremy, the winds sailed her to Nashville, where she studied media design and animation at the Art Institute of Tennessee. She moved back home and worked at a daycare—donating her free time as a counselor at her childhood church. 

“I have the pre-I-knew-I-was-going-to-be-a-tattoo-artist-story,” she said softly. Humble. “I used to draw on people in high school. They would always have me write scriptures and stuff on their arms.” She knew she had an artist’s hungry blood, but never figured it would lead where it did. 

Fate is rarely free of irony though. Because it was at her childhood church that her husband introduced her to Jeremy, “at a church I’d gone to my whole life and never knew who he was,” she said. She made up her mind to walk into the shop one day and ask for an apprenticeship. 

“I came up here to talk to him, and he was like, ‘we don’t need an apprentice.’” 

Yet one weekend she was working youth camp, painting bibles and covering kids with sharpie scripture. Lenzi and Jeremy’s daughter was there that weekend, and she came home with one of Britt’s bibles. “It was that bible. They were like, you know what, there’s your female artist. Mhm. And they finally gave me a shot.”  

But fate, as it does, had more twists. 

Tennessee law says an artist can’t take on an apprentice until they’ve been licensed for three years. Jeremy’s three-year mark landed on Britt’s birthday.

“Lenzi and I had gone to get smoothies,” she said. “We’re sitting there, and she’s like, ‘Britt, I’m sorry to have to tell you; we’re gonna have to wait until the 22nd of November to sign you.’” 

“I was like, are you serious?” Lenzi hesitated, thinking she was upset. But Britt just smiled. “That’s my birthday.”

Fate is rarely free of irony. Sometimes, it circles the globe just to make sure you’re paying attention. 

Fate, faith, destiny, whatever—community runs through everybody’s lifeblood at Hard Rock. “ Britt and I film at church. We do Facebook Live and we edit the videos,” Jeremy said. “We do an Easter egg hunt in Jefferson Street Park where we raise money through tattooing. We gave away like 300 Easter baskets and stuff last year.” 

On Valentine’s Day, Joshua Small, with his black-and-white room full of foul rappers, organizes an event through the shop where he takes cards and flowers to bedridden patients in retirement homes. Jeremy likes to say, “if you’re going to be a cog in the wheel of the community, you need to give back, you know?” 

Hard Rock, with its painted walls and clean counters—a playlist of Pink Floyd and Bob Marley dancing through the halls, Britt’s quiet voice in your ear, isn’t the kind of beach its artists washed up on like driftwood. 

Hollywood’s odyssey to Hard Rock wasn’t a straight, smooth ride over the high plains of Kansas or Oklahoma either. She rode the mountains to get where she is. Her driver’s license might say Christine, but few would know it.  

Hollywood picked up her name young. “At like 18, 19, I was already working in bars,” and looking like a tang fish in a carp pond, “I came in one day and I was wearing blue aviator glasses and a blue sequined skirt because that was the thing back then,” she said, “and they’re like, what’s up Hollywood? And then it just stuck.”  

It stuck through years as Hollywood the bartender, Hollywood the DJ, Hollywood the pinup model, the roller derby blocker. It stuck through stints tattooing in Chattanooga and Washington, and it flew home with her to Tullahoma. “I’ve been breaking barriers for so long. Because people look at me and I’m big, tall, and I look mean, but I’m, like, super friendly. And I’m the most extroverted introvert you’ll probably ever meet.”

A name like that doesn’t come from nowhere. Comes from being a little larger than life—taller than the dudes around you and bright like a Broadway marquee. 

Hollywood returned to Tennessee during COVID to be with her mother. She tried out shops in Manchester but wrote them off—too rough, too unprofessional. “I just didn’t think they were quite up to par,” she said.

Hard Rock was her last stop before resigning to commuting every day to Murfreesboro. She stepped through the door, met Jeremy and Lenzi, and just knew. “This is me. This is where I need to be. As soon as I walked in, I knew it was different,” she said. “It’s nice coming to work and actually having a real family—the level of professionalism, cleanliness of the shop, attitude toward customer service, attitude towards art,  challenging each other to be better, you know. And they do do a lot of charity work and that’s big to me.”

Right now Hard Rock is working with the local animal shelter. Anybody that comes and gets any kind of pet tattoo, Snoopy, paw print, whatever, the shop donates a portion of the money. On the front counter there’s a donation bin. “ There was this dog that the animal shelter found that was terribly beat up by some neighborhood kids,” Hollywood explained, “ and I have a soft spot for pitbulls. I’ve rescued pitbulls for years. My dog Ivan is a little pitbull-boxer mix, and he’s the sweetest thing on the planet. But we’ve done a lot of fundraisers—collected donated items for victims of house fires and stuff.” 

Hard Rock isn’t trying to prove anything. You won’t see them at well-to-do events delivering a report on how they’re giving back. They carry that around quietly, like a diamond in a coal miner’s overalls. Nobody is trying to redefine tattooing. They’re just doing it. Their actions are their reward, not their words. The stereotypes don’t float there—the illusion that all tattoo shops are rough, reckless, rebellious. The people who walk through the door either know it, or figure it out fast. 

The old man getting his first tattoo at 93 because his late wife would never let him—getting a tattoo of her name, looking up at the ceiling, looking up at her with a half smirk and a big smile that says, ‘I love you; just don’t hit me in the grave.’ The old farmer getting a portrait of his family hayloft. The mother getting her son’s name in his handwriting. Inside, a tattoo gun fires up.