Fleur Noire Tattoo — Local services in New York

Unfortunately we had a very bad experience with Fleur Noire. We were traveling from Australia to NYC for a few days in early November and did a lot of research on NYC artists and chose Laura and Andres. We booked and paid our deposits 3 months ahead. We sent through a lot of information for the designs we wanted and were told the artists would draft up designs to be ready for our appointments. We popped into the studio about 2 hours before to ask how they preferred payment. It took about 5 minutes before anyone even acknowledged we were there and even then, it was one of the artists who was on her way out the door, she said cash was best. We went and withdrew the huge amount of cash we we’d need for the work then returned about 3:10 in time for our appointments at 3:30. I told the guy at the desk we were there for our appointments with Laura and Andres, he looked concerned and said he’d be with us in a minute. He went out the back to make a call and was out there for a long time. We could tell something was definitely not right. In the mean time, after Laura finished with another client she was typing on her phone for quite a while - I got an email from her at that time asking if she could reschedule my appointment as she had a toothache and had to go to the dentist - this email was sent just 15 minutes before my appointment. I got Laura’s attention and told her I’d already arrived, she explained that she needed to see the dentist and could we reschedule for tomorrow. We were only in NYC for 4 days and had put aside that afternoon for the tattoos. I asked her what was going on with the appointment for my partner as it appeared Andres wasn’t even there. They then explained that there had been a mistake with the booking and Andres was on his day off. They offered us another artist to come in and do my partners tattoo, however Laura asked again if we could reschedule for mine. I said I really couldn’t do any other time, I was only in town for another 2 days and had other plans. She begrudgingly agreed to do my tattoo then, asking me how big I wanted it - presumably to get an indication of the time it would take, she then went back to finishing up with her previous client. My partner declined the offer of another artist - he had specifically chosen Andres. Laura clearly did not want to do mine then and it appeared that she wasn’t prepared either - I had sent through all the details of the size and placement but she seemed unaware of this, so I’m not sure she’d even done up the sketch. I was really uncomfortable and decided I didn’t want to be sitting there being tattooed by someone who was clearly unwell and didn’t want to be doing the work. We got our $200 deposits back in cash and left pretty disappointed. While we got our deposits back, we had actually lost money in this whole debacle - we did not get the PayPal transaction fees refunded and as we were traveling from Australia, we had a bunch of transaction and conversion fees that we had to pay on the deposits plus getting the cash out from ATM. We were also left with a huge amount of cash that we weren’t going to be able to use in 2 days and therefore would lose money on converting them back to Australian dollars. Not to mention the whole afternoon we’d wasted and the cab charges to get there and back. I fully understand that Laura wasn’t feeling well and that was out of her control, but I would have appreciated an email earlier in the day. I’m also disappointed that she didn’t seem familiar with the design I was after, her question about the size made me think she’d not even read the brief, let alone prepared a sketch. The situation for my partner’s appointment was beyond ridiculous, deposit was paid and several emails exchanged - how did it get missed? While the tattoos I have seen these guys do for other clients is really beautiful work and the studio was nice and clean, our experience was a complete waste of time and money - both of which are pretty valuable things when...

This review is about the tattoo artist Macho and his poor communication skills, not Fleur Noire itself (the shop did a great job communicating and was super friendly and helpful).

My girlfriend and I decided to gift each other tattoos for Christmas, so we reached out to Macho via email on December 16th. After not hearing back for a few days, we DM’d him on Instagram to let him know that we had emailed him and to ask whether there was a better way to go about booking an appointment. After seeing our DM, he responded to our email with a price estimate to which we replied by asking if he had any availably in January. After a week passed by with no response, we DM’d him again on December 28th to let him know that we had responded. He emailed back the next day and offered us an appointment for January 19th. We replied that same day saying that worked for us and for him to please let us know any next steps (e.g. paying a deposit). Once again, after giving him a week to respond, we emailed him on January 5th to confirm the appointment and ask about the deposit. We waited another week and still no reply. Finally, we decided to call Fleur Noire, and they were super helpful and told us that they would try to get ahold of Macho and figure out the status of our appointment. It turns out that we had no appointment with Macho (not a huge surprise considering we hadn’t submitted a deposit).

Luckily, the shop was able to schedule an appointment for us with Macho on January 26th. However, on the morning of the 26th, Macho emailed us to reschedule saying he had a family emergency and couldn’t make it to our appointment that day. We completely understood the circumstances and called the shop to reschedule. They told us to email Macho back directly to re-schedule given that I am leaving the country at the beginning of February and not returning until August. They also said that if we didn’t hear back from Macho the next day that they could either refund our deposits, hold on to them until August, or try to find us another artist. Unsurprisingly, Macho didn’t respond to our email about rescheduling, and we ended up getting our deposit back.

Overall, my girlfriend and I are super frustrated with Macho’s communication and feel like he was unprofessional. While we completely understand the family emergency situation, especially with COVID, with regard to everything else Macho wasted our time. We don’t know why it was so hard to get ahold of him (especially considering that he always posts Instagram stories saying “Now Booking”) but we feel like he could have at least tried to act like he cared about us as clients. In the whole time it took for us to even get an appointment on the books (over a month), my girlfriend and I could have found another artist. We really loved Macho’s work, which is why we tried to stick with him–clearly a...

I would give this place 0 starts if I could, because 1 star implies that there was actually some positive aspect of dealing with this place, when there literally wasn’t one. I didn’t even end up getting a tattoo.

My friend and I had planned to come in from out of state (a 2 hour drive, so 4 hour round trip) just because we loved the work we saw on their Instagram so much. To be clear, all of the artists here seem incredible and I would’ve loved the privilege of wearing their art on my body, and this review is solely related to the customer service aspect of Fleur Noire. We called in every day, at least once if not twice a couple of days, to verify that having walk-in appointments done by Pobi would be possible. We were both told each and every time that if we showed up at 3:30pm on Saturday, we’d be first on the list for sure and Pobi would be able to tattoo some flash art on us right at 4pm.

So on Saturday, we drove the two hours there and got there right at 3:30. We were then told that we were at the wrong location, and Pobi was actually tattooing at their other studio a block away. That’s fine, it was our fault for going to the wrong location, so I wasn’t upset about that. But then the employee told us that Pobi didn’t start tattooing until 5pm. We said ok and asked what time we should get there and if we’d still be guaranteed spots if we showed up early enough. She said yes and to get there no earlier than 4:50, so we went to go kill 80 minutes.

At 4:50, we arrived at the correct location. We told them what we were there for, and the woman said there were already 4 people in front of us and that Pobi doesn’t even do flash art as walk ins. We explained to her that we’d been calling multiple times a day to make sure this was doable and followed every single thing they asked us to do, explained that we’d driven two hours for this, etc. but she just said that she could put us on the list and call us when it was our turn. We didn’t want to waste our whole trip, so we agreed, and she said we could call at any time for updates. We waited an hour and called in to see what the progress was like since we also didn’t want to get back home too terribly late. She told us that they got a late start in tattooing and the first customer wasn’t even done yet. We ended up waiting about another hour before we just gave up and drove the two hours back home. Oh and they never even did call us to tell us it was our turn. 0/5 stars honestly, I’ll never give them my money, especially since they seemed so determined not to...