Sol Tribe Closes After Fifteen Years

Sol Tribe, the tattoo and piercing shop at 56 Broadway, has closed after fifteen years...and one major tragedy.

"Sol Tribe is officially closed as of today," the shop shared in an Instagram post on July 1. "We want to thank you, our amazing clients and friends, for an incredible fifteen years of piercing and tattooing you. Y'all have supported us through figurative hell, during our hardest moments and we will never forget that. We are stunned by this news and we are heart broken."

The closure was unexpected, the post noted, adding that the staff had to "say final goodbyes to the studio today suddenly." In the post's caption, Sol Tribe listed where the shop's artists would now be working.

"We thought we had another month of sorting out details before the final closing of Sol Tribe, but that wasn't the case," it added. "We are completely devastated."

Sol Tribe was opened in 2008 under the leadership of Alicia Cardenas, who'd started out with the shop Twisted Sol in 1997. Cardenas was one of six people murdered in a shooting spree that involved other tattoo shops on December 27, 2021; the shooter started at Sol Tribe, where he also killed jewelry manager Alyssa Gunn-Maldonado, whose husband was injured in the attack. Small businesses near Sol Tribe came together to support the workers there, and many tattoo shops hosted fundraisers. The shooting will be the subject of an Investigation Discovery show, with the Denver episode coming out July 8 on MAX.

Just two weeks before she was murdered, Cardenas spoke with Westword about the history of tattooing in Denver, and how she worked to create a welcoming scene.

"I have been building my tattoo shop vision since day one about making a space that was more inclusive and more friendly to different walks of life, the queer community — taking it out of the biker, prisoner sort of realm and getting it into a space where anyone who wanted to could walk in and get a good tattoo and feel comfortable," Cardenas said.

“And that’s really what it’s about," she continued. "Taking it out of this history of bad behavior that’s undeniable when you have a whole industry born off people who come out of prison or who have embraced this alternative lifestyle — there’s gonna be drugs and misogyny and abuse. But the part where it’s been reborn, where people who are nonbinary have a voice — that’s been going on for a while, that’s been manifesting and switching and evolving for at least the last 25 years.”

And for fifteen of those years, Sol Tribe was a leader of that change.

Sol Tribe management has not been available for comment; we'll update this post as soon as we connect.