Beginning & Background
Stefan Getty grew up in Antrim, Northern Ireland, in a household where creativity wasn’t a hobby it was a way of life. Art was woven into the fabric of his childhood from the very beginning. After bath time, his father a naturally artistic man would sit the family around the fire and draw cartoons of their entire family group together. It was in those quiet, warm evenings that something took root in Stefan. He was always the kid doing the posters in primary school, always the one doing everybody else’s art in high school. There was never a moment, he recalls, when art wasn’t part of his life.
He attended Ulster University, but the real education Stefan was drawn to couldn’t be found in a lecture hall. It was happening in tattoo shops, in ink and skin and the stories people carried into studios wanting to make permanent. From the time he was a child, Stefan was moving toward somethin he just hadn’t yet found the medium that would make it all make sense.
The Spark & Motivation
That moment of ignition came at 13 or 14 years old, during a two-week school work experience placement that Stefan arranged under his own quiet cunning. He told his school he was going to an art gallery. He was actually going to Underworld Ink in Ballymena a proper old-school tattoo shop on Linen Hall Street, run by hardcore, rock-and-roll tattooers who had been at it for decades. It was, by his own description, a rude awakening. And it bit him immediately.
“From then, bitten,” he says simply. “I had to get into it. I had to tattoo.”
A friend of his mother, moved by the sheer passion the teenager radiated, bought him a tattoo kit. Stefan started tattooing himself covering his legs, running up and down the stairs to show his mum, who would look at him and ask, bewildered, what on earth he was doing. He started on his friends next. The early work was rough, scratchy, barely in the skin. But the commitment was total. This was before Miami Ink, before the big book opened, before tattooing became a cultural phenomenon. Stefan was in it before any of that not for the trend, but because he genuinely could not help himself.
Challenges & Obstacles
Getting a foot in the door as a young tattooer in Belfast was brutal. Stefan eventually found work at Joker Tattoo, but the experience was a masterclass in what not to do. The owner, he recalls, wasn’t really a tattooer at all he was interested in the money, not the craft. He took everything that came through the door and shared nothing. Stefan found himself getting up in the morning without enough money for the bus fare, waking his mum to ask for the coins to get to work. He stuck it out for as long as integrity demanded, then walked.
There were stints tattooing from home which he knew wasn’t ideal and periods of real uncertainty about whether he was good enough, whether he’d ever get the kind of work that would let him grow. Self-doubt visited him the way it visits every young artist who cares deeply and can’t yet prove what they sense about themselves. He persisted through shops run by people who, as he puts it, were “douchebags who didn’t care about the quality of what was coming through” men who saw tattooing as a trade rather than a calling, a way to make quick money rather than build something lasting.
It was those experiences accumulating slowly, bitterly, instructively that would eventually give him everything he needed to do it differently.
Turning Points & Growth
The turning point wasn’t a single breakthrough moment. It was a decision made out of sheer necessity and principle: if the shops he worked in couldn’t be what a shop should be, he would build one himself. In 2012, Stefan opened Cloak & Dagger Tattoo in Antrim a completely custom, appointment-only studio with £100, a handshake, and a promise to the landlord that the rent would come. It was, he says, blind faith. And it worked.
The name itself carried meaning. The opening was kept secret, underground Stefan was still working in another shop while quietly grinding to make Cloak & Dagger a reality. The secrecy became the brand. What started as necessity became identity.
The studio has moved through three locations over the years, growing each time, and Stefan has grown with it. Stylistically, he spent years refusing to be pigeonholed doing everything, learning everything, insisting that his artists do the same. “You’d be bored if you did one thing,” he says. “A perfect day in a tattoo shop for me is: do a bit of script, do a traditional rose, do a little black and grey, have a cup of tea and go home.” Over time, though, his own aesthetic compass settled on Traditional and Western-Japanese tattooing bold lines, primary colour, that unmistakable solidity that makes a tattoo look like it was always meant to be there. He earned accolades and awards at conventions, not for vanity, but because putting your work in front of other tattooers and having it stand up is its own kind of honest measure.
He also won the trust of his community client by client, conversation by conversation. At Cloak & Dagger, everything is by appointment. Nothing is rushed. Stefan meets every potential client face to face, shakes their hand, reads the room. If the vibe isn’t right, he’ll turn the work away. Because, as he puts it, you have to genuinely enjoy what you’re doing and that relationship between artist and client is not optional. It’s vital.
Challenges & Obstacles A New Battle
Then life dealt Stefan a hand that no amount of grit or craft could have prepared him for. He was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis a condition that, for a man who creates with his hands and his presence and his energy, struck at the very heart of everything he had built. MS is unpredictable and relentless. Flare-ups have brought numbness to his face and shoulder. New lesions have appeared on scans. The vibrant, restless man who said he physically cannot stand still who needs to feel development in every aspect of life has had to face the very real possibility of losing his independence.
He has continued to create art through it all. He has continued to show up for his family, his studio, his community. The Antrim community has shown up for him in return through messages, donations, prayers, and the kind of collective warmth that only forms around people who have genuinely given of themselves to others. His best friend Bill O’Brien, who has led the campaign to support Stefan’s treatment, describes him simply: “He’s the friend who listens, the artist whose work leaves a lasting mark, and the family man who puts his loved ones first.”
Stefan is now pursuing treatment with Ocrevus, one of the leading modern therapies for Multiple Sclerosis, with the goal of slowing progression, reducing flare-ups, and protecting his quality of life. The battle is ongoing. The art is ongoing. The man is still standing.
Achievements & Milestones
Stefan Getty opened Cloak & Dagger at just 20 years old sustaining not only himself, but nurturing the creative talent of others from the very beginning. The studio has grown to a team of five artists, each brought up in the Cloak & Dagger ethos of craft over commerce, relationship over transaction. The studio’s merchandise has become a phenomenon in its own right coming in and going straight back out, impossible to keep in stock, building an identity that extends well beyond the walls of the shop.
He has earned recognition at tattoo conventions across the UK and beyond, collected accolades that his peers in the industry respect, and built a following of over 25,000 on Instagram a community of collectors and admirers who know that getting tattooed by Stefan Getty means joining something. His work has been featured by Channel 4 and he has received approaches from major TV networks, all of which he has turned down flatly, because being a famous tattooer was never the goal. Being a good one was.
Values & Philosophy
Stefan Getty lives by a philosophy that he formed young and has never abandoned: if you can see it, you can make it happen. He says he wishes he could go back to his 13-year-old self and say: don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. Stick to your guns. Because every person who tried to discourage him, every shop owner who underestimated him, every gatekeeper who kept the door shut they were wrong, and he was right, and the work proved it.
He believes in diversity of skill over narrow specialisation. He believes the relationship between artist and client is sacred. He believes in building things that mean something not for the quick money, not for the fame, but because this is his life, from the time he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep. “This shop, this brand, means so much to me,” he says. “I opened Cloak & Dagger with £100, a handshake and a promise. That was blind faith and it worked out. It’s very special to me. I don’t think I’d ever let go of it, no matter where my life goes.”
Impact on Others
Stefan Getty has left his mark on Antrim in ways that go far beyond tattooed skin. He has built a studio where artists come to do the best work of their lives, where clients feel genuinely seen, and where the standard is set not by what’s fastest or most profitable but by what’s most honest. He has mentored artists who came from good shops and needed a better home, held out for the right people, and built a team he describes with undisguised excitement as everyone pushing forward at the same pace.
His response to his MS diagnosis has also shown Antrim something about the kind of man he is. He hasn’t disappeared. He hasn’t stopped. He has kept creating, kept showing up, kept bringing the warmth and humour and depth that have always defined him. And in doing so, he has given his community the chance to show what it’s made of too which it has, unreservedly.
Looking Ahead
Stefan Getty’s five-year plan, hatched before his diagnosis and still very much alive, includes buying property in New York splitting his year between Antrim and America, building clientele on both sides of the Atlantic, and eventually perhaps making the move fully, taking Cloak & Dagger’s name and spirit with him into a new chapter. Whatever city that chapter happens in, the studio will carry the same DNA: custom work, real relationships, no shortcuts.
First, there is the fight in front of him. Stefan is approaching his MS with the same stubborn, unromantic determination he has brought to every obstacle in his life not dramatising it, not surrendering to it, but dealing with it the way he deals with everything: head on, with his family around him and his craft still in his hands. For a man who started tattooing at 13 with nothing but passion and a kit his mum’s friend bought him, who opened a studio with £100 and a handshake, who built something real and lasting in a town that now carries his mark the next chapter is simply the next chapter. And if the past is any guide, he’ll make it count.
Follow Stefan Getty on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stefangettytattoo?igsh=MTJvNDZma2s0MWUxaA==