By the ruins of an old rake factory, chanterelle mushrooms glow gold among the creek-bed shrubbery. Nearby, a wattle fence, the kind made by weaving slender branches around staves, keeps wandering chickens in line. And in a shady nook not far from a classic Vermont farmhouse and vegetable garden stands the newly built Middle Son Tattoo studio.
The tucked-away location, reached solely by a narrow and bumpy Class 4 road, matters. Mostly in Peacham but partly in Danville, nearly brushing the Barnet border but with a post office address in St. Johnsbury, this rustic 22-acre property is intended to be an overnight destination for community-centered tattoo tourism.
Tattoo customers will be invited to stay in a yet-to-be-built cabin on the property or pitch tents near the poultry and fungi. From there, they can explore the Northeast Kingdom, visiting the “different shops, breweries and restaurants,” said artist Caleb Colpitts, 34.
Long-haired and bespectacled, Colpitts presides over Middle Son in a Cape-style cottage built primarily with timber from the property, which he owns with his brother and sister-in-law. A goldenrod-colored door stands out from dark slats, and the paint in each room echoes shades from the William Morris wallpaper in the entryway. The studio proper is intricately tiled with black and white hexagons and features polished brass lights repurposed from ships.
On Saturday, August 23, Colpitts will open Middle Son’s doors to the public with a ticketed party that includes musical performances, an art fair, self-guided trail tours, local food and beverages, and tattooists offering quick “flash” pieces. To further his goal of contributing to the local economy, he’s asked an artist friend to make a curated guide to area eateries and shops for out-of-towners.
Colpitts is a classically trained illustrator and painter who has been honing his craft since childhood. Growing up in the Northeast Kingdom, he was initially homeschooled alongside his brothers; at St. Johnsbury Academy, he was president of the Intaglio Society printmaking club. He began studying tattooing in 2018 and got a job at Lucky’s tattoo studio in Boston the following year.
Colpitts offers ink of all kinds, but his favorite type of work is large pieces sketched directly on the wearer’s skin rather than applied via stencil. “It’s illustrative blackwork tattooing with inspiration from etchings, woodcuts and engravings,” he said. Common subjects include delicate botanical drawings, creatures from fantasy and myth, and architectural flourishes.
He prefers freehand illustration because “it’s really easy to make the tattoo move with the person’s body,” Colpitts explained. “It feels more collaborative. I’ll draw a layer and have them look at it. I’ll darken it and darken it as they’re watching me. It’s very intimate.”
And time-consuming. The opportunity to spend a night on the property, or several, would facilitate the intense, multi-session artworks that Colpitts most enjoys — and which, at about $200 per hour, keep the lights on and the tattoo needles humming. (He hasn’t yet set the cost of an overnight stay.)
“He was always very meticulous in his work,” recalled Kim Darling, a St. Johnsbury Academy emeritus art teacher and multimedia artist with a focus on drawing and printmaking. “He was slow and methodical — slow in a good way.”
Each year, beginning in 2006, Darling and her husband, Bill, also a St. Johnsbury Academy art teacher and artist, took Intaglio Society members on two-week trips to Florence, Italy, where they studied the masters and created their own work. Colpitts was one of the rare students who took the trip all four years of high school. He financed the travel by working at Poulsen Lumber in Littleton, N.H., “every summer, for the whole summer, for those two weeks in Italy,” Colpitts said.
On two of those trips, Colpitts overlapped with fellow academy student Franky Cannon, now a professional artist and author. Cannon is the recipient of one of Colpitts’ tattoos: an image of a bloodroot plant, blossom to roots, on her left forearm. From 2020, it’s the most recent of her 10 tattoos.
“Each of my tattoos is [by] a different artist,” Cannon said. “I draw each one, and I encourage them to reinterpret or change [it].” While most artists don’t stray far from the drawing, she added, “Caleb made it his own style … a totally new drawing. It’s my most precise tattoo. It’s my favorite tattoo.”
For Jesse de Alva, a blacksmith, metalworker and machine shop assistant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Colpitts tattoo was his first. And it’s a big one.
While his partner, Rachel Luu, was getting a tattoo on her thigh and hip that combines California poppies, lavender and Massachusetts mayflowers, de Alva couldn’t keep his eyes off a drawing by Colpitts that hung on the wall. During Luu’s six-hour appointment, he snuck a photo of the image, and he found himself staring at it over the next few months. Finally, he called up Colpitts and booked his first session.
The resulting piece, which took about 25 hours to complete, features a bear skull surrounded by deep black ink on de Alva’s chest, with ferns skimming his collarbones and guiding the eye to intricate floral patterns on his shoulders. On his upper back is an iris, mirroring the skull and also bordered by black, surrounded by additional flowers.
“I’m excited about creating a garden on someone’s body,” Colpitts said.
Luu, an MIT PhD candidate in materials science and engineering, said she and de Alva are considering getting more of Colpitts’ tattoos and love the idea of taking a Vermont vacation in the process.
“It’s such a special and unique experience,” Luu said.
“It creates even more intimacy with Colpitts and his work,” de Alva added. “His style and personality leak through everything.”
For the moment, Colpitts is splitting his time between Vermont and Massachusetts, where his partner, Genevieve Cohn, is a visiting lecturer in art at Wellesley College and he teaches visual art at the Cambridge School of Weston, a progressive boarding school. He also continues to tattoo at Lucky’s.
“I gain energy from spending energy,” Colpitts said. “I don’t take a lot of downtime.”
Whenever he can, he’ll be in Peacham offering his signature larger pieces, along with smaller tattoos he calls “pick-your-own.” The plan is for him to immortalize in ink what guests have foraged in the woods and fields.
Over time, Colpitts hopes to take on apprentices, perhaps other St. Johnsbury Academy alums who would prefer to stay in the area. He’ll also help his older brother, Nathan, and sister-in-law Andrea Otto, who live on-site, develop a sheep farm and orchard. Together they’re exploring the idea of opening other studios and shops on the property, which as a whole is called Rake Factory Arts.
Their efforts aim to answer a question, Colpitts said: “How do we get artists in the NEK to be in community and also [attract] artists to come to the NEK?”
With a dedicated following and gorgeous locale, Rake Factory Arts could make a mark.
Grand opening of Middle Son Tattoo, Saturday, August 23, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., at 1297 Rake Factory Rd. in Peacham. $35.88.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Tattoo With a View | In the Northeast Kingdom, a new ink studio aims to become a destination for tattoo tourism”
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2025.
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