Best of KC 2023: Grimm Tattoo emerges phoenix-like from the ashes

The new Grimm Tattoo location in the West Bottoms. // Courtesy Facebook

This month, we published The Pitch’s annual Best of Kansas City issue. You can browse the results of the readers’ poll here. The issue also included a list, compiled and written by our editorial staff, of some of our current favorite things about Kansas City in 2023. We’ll be publishing these items online throughout November. 

After a fabric shop next door burst into flames, Grimm Tattoo—and the entire set of connected buildings it occupied at the corner of Main & 39th Street in Westport—burned to the ground. The next morning, we met with owner Wes Grimm as he smoked a cigarette, standing on the still-smoldering rubble of his family business. “There just hasn’t been time to cry,” the man in a black cowboy hat and bolo-tie told us as he listed off all the work that he needed to do towards rebuilding. The Grimm family business had operated here for more than 40 years, with Bert Grimm being one of the American pioneers of the inky art form.

The Bert Grimm Tattoo Museum, just around the corner from the main building, which housed more than 100 years of tattoo history and design, was luckily untouched by the flames that claimed the rest of the business. Despite space limitations in that small historic space, some of Grimm’s tattoo artists were inking folks the very next day. The shop has since reopened a fully staffed permanent Grimm Tattoo location at 1613 Genessee Street.