Inside Dr. Woo’s Secret Two-Week New York Residency

Some tattoos happen impulsively, the product of one too many tequilas, or maybe a breakup. Others follow months of painstaking research, conversations with artists, jpegs pinged back and forth. The musician Amanda Shires came by her new bicepful of shimmering lilies in slightly more circuitous fashion. Last week, Shires arrived at the Freehand Hotel, just north of New York’s Gramercy Park. She waited in one of the mezzanine’s Roman and Williams-designed not-quite-midcentury chairs. Eventually, a young man named Abraham collected her, escorting her up to the 18th floor. They passed through the bowels of the rooftop cocktail bar the Broken Shaker, climbed a rickety staircase, and opened a door into the 19th-floor mechanic’s room.

Inside, a kind of oasis: bottle-green walls, overstuffed leather furniture with fur throws, incense patiently infusing the space. Against one wall, a drafting table; near another, a chair, rolling stool, and lamp. In the middle of the room stood a casually lanky guy draped in finery: ballcap pulled low, Celine cateye shades, cropped leather jacket, industrial-buckle future-boots. This was Hideaway NYC, a two-weeks-only outpost of Hideaway at Suite X, the buried-deep-in-the-Hollywood-Roosevelt tattoo parlor. That guy in the middle? Inker to the stars—and the proprietor of Hideaway—Dr. Woo.

Here, as in Los Angeles, the Goodfellas-style entrance is merely the final barrier among many standing between Shires’s patch of bare upper arm and Woo’s delicate, photorealistic work. “I tried scheduling a tattoo with him a long time ago, back when the wait list was three months or something,” she said. “I'd never seen anybody that did circles like that or fine-line work or make it look kind of photographic.” Life got in the way, and Woo kept blowing up. “I kept putting it off and putting it off, and then it's impossible.”

In L.A., birthplace of the right to bare arms, Woo has achieved godlike status, with a waitlist said to measure in years. He’s well on his way to the same elsewhere around the world, jetting monthly to Paris or Hong Kong for a few days of work.

But Woo doesn’t really come to New York. “I'm never here,” he explained in one of the hotel’s restaurants a few days later. “I mean, I'm not a stranger, but I'm just never here. Especially in the last two or three years. With the travel schedule as packed as it is, if I'm leaving the family”—Woo has two kids—"I'd rather go far.”

So what brought Woo out east? The answer starts where answers so often do in creative circles in 2019: with Virgil Abloh.

Back before he was the menswear designer of Louis Vuitton or running Off-White or jetsetting across the globe, Abloh was a college kid studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin. His roommate was a guy named Gabriel Stulman. They'd throw parties together: Virgil DJing, Stulman running hospitality. After graduating, Abloh went to architecture school, and then pursued a graduate degree in dopeness by linking up with Kanye West. Stulman came to New York, and would go on to become a restauranteur responsible for a whole tiny empire of permanently jammed, never off-putting restaurants in the West Village. He's also the guy in charge of the food and beverage program here at the Freehand.

The two stayed close, and when Stulman wanted a tattoo, he asked his pal Virgil. Abloh suggested Woo, whom he knew through Alyx designer Matthew Williams. Soon enough, Stulman found himself in L.A., the lucky owner of a Hideaway appointment. He did the whole Goodfellas thing there, and was struck by how unlike other tattoo shops it was.

“The Hideaway is one chair,” he said. “If you're getting work done, you're getting it done by Woo, and the whole room just feels like you've stepped into his universe. [Woo’s assistant] Abe immediately hits me with hospitality when I enter. He's like, ‘Hey, if you're thirsty or hungry, just let me know. We've got a room service menu because we are in a hotel and we can arrange that.’ I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, ‘This is fucking cool. This is personal and intimate.’ Not all tattoo experiences are like that. When have I been in a tattoo parlor and somebody's like, ‘Do you want to see a room service menu?’”

So Stulman—who, after all, had his own secret hotel space and room-service menu—started working on Woo, who eventually agreed to come east for a week. They put their heads together, blocked off some time, and started reaching out to folks from both of their worlds with an interest in Woo’s work. Under the direction of set designer Ama Rompoulias, the dishwashers and kitchen manager gave the walls a fresh paint job, while the rest of the team imported some plants up to the spot and hung a few Stevie Nicks-style shawls from the hot-water pipes flanking the place. Stulman added the finishing touch. “We've got room service available,” he said, smiling. “So now we've got Hideaway New York for two weeks.”

A week into the process, all parties are feeling pretty good. For Stulman, Hideaway represents the chance to apply his craft outside his traditional restaurant domain. His Happy Cooking company puts on events throughout the year in service of that idea. But, he explained, he had started thinking. “Do those events need to be confined by being food-related?” It helps that his spots remain oases of good vibes in a blisteringly competitive New York food scene where good vibes go a long way. “If people think that we can create cool restaurants,” he suggested, “can they take a leap of faith and say, If these guys are doing an event it's likely to be cool, because I liked the restaurants and like how they treat me?”

In part, Stulman’s applying a philosophy best articulated by his old college roommate. “In one of these interviews that Virgil did, somebody was asking, ‘You're all over the place. You do fashion. You DJ a lot. You're doing a lot of art.’ And he believes that that intersection, where those worlds connect, is as important as the worlds in their own individuality.” So the New York restauranteur links up with the Los Angeles tattoo artist, and they shack up in a boiler room at the top of a hotel on Lexington Avenue. The intersection is where the juice is.

For Woo’s part, the New York residency is part of a broader, continuing effort to carve out ever-more-unique space in the tattoo world. He started as an apprentice at Hollywood’s legendary Shamrock Social Club, learning from single-needle pioneer Mark Mahoney, picking up and putting his own spin on Mahoney’s ultra-detailed technique. He blew up on Instagram, started etching the likes of Kendall Jenner and Drake with his fine-line, ethereal, astrology-inflected designs.

And while Instagram helped boost Woo into the stratosphere, it’s also resulted in a generation of tattoo artists who didn’t have to mop floors and clean bathrooms to learn at the hands of a master: they can just go to YouTube. “Before, if I wanted to get something cool, I'd have to travel,” he explained. “Or even if there's an artist you heard of, you would only see his stuff if a magazine came out and they published it, or if another person came to you to get a tattoo and you saw [that they had that artist’s] tattoo. Now, it's like you're just taking a shit and you can see it. Some guy 500 miles away just did a tattoo and he posted it right now. You see it in real time.”

All of this has a strange effect on the value of his work. He’s not upset about the proliferation of Woo-inspired tattoos, on Instagram and elsewhere—a world where bad tattoos are rare is a better one, as far as he’s concerned, and he’s pretty good at this. But for all the biters, there’s only one Dr. Woo: by the time his New York residency ends, just 25 lucky folks will have emerged with fresh ink. And the likes of Jessica Alba and Brooklyn Beckham, to name two recent clients, want Woo, not Woo-lite.

Success has also allowed Woo to get back in touch with the late-teens version of himself, the one who started a streetwear line (“It was called Surrender Everything and it was just like, cool little T-shirt designs”) and ran a store slinging gotta-have-it premium denim in West Hollywood in the early 2000s. He’s always been into fashion, and now fashion is into him. Those righteous boots he was wearing turn out to be unreleased Dior (“Kim [Jones] gave them to me.”), and he grew animated while discussing the cutthroat How to Make It in America world of selling jeans on Melrose. He’s done collaborations with Converse, Sacai, and H&M subline Nyden, along with covetable Hideaway merch.

But tattooing is still the thing, the alpha and the omega. For Woo, that it now happens in thoughtfully appointed hotel lounges and rooftop spaces, rather than grungy parlors, doesn’t alter the rare intimacy of the act itself. “It's one of the oldest forms of social interaction,” he said. “Literally, you're spilling blood together. I think a lot of the meaning gets swept away over the years, but it's pretty cool.”

On day one, that became clear quickly. Hideaway may be a secret tattoo aerie atop an achingly cool boutique hotel, and Woo may be, in his late 30s, a young legend is his world. But it turns out that tattooing here is basically like tattooing anywhere. He and Shires huddled above his sticker-encrusted laptop, poring over Google searches for the da Vinci-inspired lilies she’s looking for. They settled on an idea, and Woo put the design to paper. That was transferred to a stencil, which Woo carefully applied to Shire’s upper arm. They sat under a dangling lamp as Woo got to work.

I was struck by his bedside manner: this solitary, luxury-fashion wearing dude was mellow, even gentle, as he gets to work. He kept up a steady stream of patter. This, he’d tell me later, is the idea. “A lot of times tattooing is painful and it's a committed thing that you're getting,” he said. “Sure, people are excited and happy, but also it's a lot of commitment and a lot of uncertainty. I just want to defuse the moment, make it a calm place, put on some music that I like. If [I am] super stressed and annoyed and overanalyzing it, then they're gonna be the same way.”

Later, Shires would leave with her arm of lilies, a small compass’ circle traced at their base, photos posted to both her and Woo’s Instagrams. Looking at them now, it’s not hard to see why Woo has become so sought-after: they’re feather-light but not unaffected by gravity, almost photorealistic but warm with a story. It dawned on me then that people don’t wait a year for an original Woo just to have it. They do it to enter that strange, timeless bubble, one that produces an unusual intimacy: Woo, head down, hand steady. The trays of incense puffing away in the background. The buzz of the tattoo gun twinned by the hotel plumbing vibrating overhead.