The Spark Project Collective is a nonprofit tattoo studio dedicated to giving back to the community and helping Tucsonans live up to their full potential by teaching essential life skills.
A spark can ignite a flame that burns so brightly it transforms a place filled with darkness into a place filled with light and warmth.Just ask Johnny Vasquez, the founder of Tucson’s very own unique spark — the Spark Project Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to giving back to the community. The organization helps Tucsonans learn essential life skills that allow them to live up to their full potential.
But ask around Tucson, and almost anyone could tell you what the organization is best known for: their tattoo and piercing studio. In 2021, Spark Project Collective donated nearly 20,000 toys to kids in local foster care systems, 3,500 hygiene kits and 6,000 pieces of clothing to those experiencing homelessness or in foster care, $25,000 to the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, and provided around 200 visits to Reid Park Zoo to low-income families, according to their website.
Not your typical tattoo studioWhen you walk into Four of Wands, you’re greeted by a few things: the vibrant lime-green walls of the shop’s vendor booths, the ceiling that’s painted to look like a star-filled night and one of the shop’s many metaphysicians, including shop manager and medium Natalie Palomarez.
“When a person walks in, they're greeted right away, they're helped and assisted,” he says. “Most tattoo artists have their own individual rooms that they tattoo out of, so there's privacy. We just tried to give it a whole different unique feeling on the tattoo side of things. Everybody works with each other. So there isn't a set clientele, which is very different. We encourage our clients to get tattooed by all artists here.
“What we're doing here, too, is that we both have backgrounds in educating people with life skills where schools nowadays fail,” Vasquez says. “They don't teach that stuff. And so that's what our goal is. Within these walls, or wherever we find ourselves at as a group, is to educate outside of the walls and teach them really vital life skills beyond tattooing or practicing astrology or whatever it is. You've got to be able to function in all parts of the world.
Wilborn made an appointment to get a flash tattoo during one of Spark Project Collective’s Friday the 13th tattoo specials and that’s when he met Vasquez for the first time.The two had a conversation about Wilborn starting an apprenticeship, which he began a few weeks after the initial meeting. The apprenticeship consisted of practicing line work, doing small tattoos and life-coaching sessions from Vasquez.
“In essence, it was getting him out of a situation where he felt stuck,” Vasquez says. “And also giving him the courage to be able to open up about the transition and what he was feeling and telling his parents. It was just this whole encompassing thing and Bryce is still with us today. I don't think Bryce will ever leave. I think he feels welcome. He has a home. He's now married. It's gone whole full circle.
“I just feel like I've gotten to a point in my life where I don't have to be money-oriented,” Vasquez says. “I'd much rather get the money out to try to help people that are struggling a little bit or just show people that others genuinely care, even if they don't know who they are.” The rapid growth that Vasquez speaks of is no joke. Since initially reporting this story, Spark Project Collective has launched an online store, announced a new paranormal convention coming to Tucson later this year and hosted multiple maker markets.
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