As far as I can tell, Nick also worked in North Carolina, Hawaii and Phoenix Arizona. Apparently Nick had sustained a pretty severe head injury from the beating that plagued him the rest of his life. I have heard this story from a number of people that knew Nick - apparently when he was working on State Street in Chicago, he was beat up by the mob and was forced to move back home to Colorado Springs and live with his mother, Mary. Colorado Springs is a huge military town with several air force and army bases, so I can imagine the demand at the pool hall could have been pretty high on paydays. Years later, I was told by Henry Goldfield that when he was tattooing in Denver in the 60s, he would ride his motorcycle down to Colorado Springs and help him out on military paydays, as the work load was more than Nick could manage on his own. The one that stood out to me the most was beautiful classic rose on his leg that Nick had done. Snake had been tattooed by Nick 4 times in the late 60s and showed us the tattoos and they were beautiful. Nick had outfitted a shop in the back of the pool hall to capitalize on the steady flow of military servicemen that frequented the establishment. Colorado Nick tattooed up the street on the northeast corner of Colorado and Tejon in the back of a popular pool hall called Recreation Billiards. Alexander had a shop in downtown Colorado Springs and was known for painting his flash on sheets of glass. My wife Kayla and I went over to pick up the flash from Snake and got to talking about tattoo history in Colorado Springs and he mentioned two guys from the generation just before him in the 1950s/60s, Robert Alexander and Colorado Nick Wisner. Colorado Springs tattoo legend Snake Yates was retiring and I purchased all the flash off the walls of his long standing shop on Platte avenue. I didn’t get any real concrete information on Colorado Nick until some years later. I didn’t ask for any details at the time, although in hindsight I wished I had. ![]() ![]() I stopped an older gentleman at the grocery store to ask who did the tattoo on his arm, and he told me it was done by Colorado Nick. I first heard the name Colorado Nick 12 or so years ago.
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