The Closest Tattoo Expo Was a Flight Away — So Cairns Built Its Own
No competitions. No corporate backing. No website. No bullshit. Jake Straat built Far North Queensland's first tattoo expo on word of mouth and sheer will — and the artists are already calling it the best in the country. This is how Rainforest & Reef came together.
Two days before Cairns got its first tattoo expo, Jake Straat (@straats_tatts) was wrapping fences.
Not metaphorically. Actually wrapping fences — at the Cairns Showgrounds, early morning, alongside his partner Kaarina, a crew of volunteers, and Drew (@drewstattooss666) from Obsidian Tattoo Studio (@obsidian_tattoo_studio_emerald) in Emerald, who'd driven up with his partner Tearnie and just started helping without being asked. Tables needed building. Booths needed assembling. Marquees, workstations, wash stations, bins. The whole infrastructure of a two-day event materialising slowly in the Cairns winter sun — which, for the artists arriving from down south, probably felt less like winter and more like a particularly generous Tuesday.
I was there as crew, alongside my wife George Tattooing (@georgetattoing) — both of us roped in, the way these things happen, by a friend who needed hands. (George stepped in late, when another volunteer pulled out; I'd said yes months earlier, more or less the day Jake first told me what he was planning.) We'd landed in Cairns straight off the back of the Golden Hand Tattoo Convention in Perth — a big show in a big city, professionally run and worth attending — the kind of expo that does what it sets out to do. Two expos in one week, near enough. By the end of the second one the contrast would be impossible to miss.
I first met Jake on the expo circuit years ago. We're both from Cairns, both came up the same way — skateboards, heavy metal, punk and hardcore shows in whatever room would have us — and both ended up in and around the tattoo industry. So when he told me he was bringing an expo to Far North Queensland, I didn't need convincing. I've believed for a while that smaller, destination-based expos are where this culture is heading: away from the exhibition-centre megashows in the capitals, toward something more intentional. I'd seen what that looks like done properly at the New Plymouth NZ Tattoo and Arts Festival.
Jake had too. "The expo in New Plymouth could possibly be one of the most famous tattoo expos within the tattoo community," he told me. "The fact it's quite exclusive makes everyone want to work it. People love travelling to see somewhere new and being able to work at the same time — it's truly the best part about our job."
That's the thing destination expos understand that the megashows forget. The travel isn't a cost — not for the punters, and not for the artists. For a tattooer, the chance to work somewhere actually worth being, instead of the concrete and stop-start traffic of another capital-city convention centre, is the point.
Jake and Kaarina's spirits through the build were high. Genuinely, unreasonably high given the amount of work still ahead of them and the fact that neither had done anything quite like this before. That energy didn't drop once across the whole weekend. It's contagious, that kind of thing — it kept the rest of us going long after our backs had started lodging formal complaints.
A Thousand Kilometres From the Nearest Expo
Jake Straat has been tattooing for eleven years. He owns and operates Royal Blue Tattoo in Cairns and co-hosts Rats Get Fat (@ratsgetfatpodcast) with Zuzz Rains (@zuzz_royal) — a podcast documenting tattoo history and culture that's built a genuine following for the same reason the expo would: it takes its subject seriously without taking itself too seriously. He's worked expos nationally and internationally, won a heap of awards, travelled the world on the back of his work. He doesn't take any of it for granted. He's also spent a fair chunk of that time becoming quietly frustrated with how the Australian expo circuit treats the people who make it run.
"I was quite disappointed with a lot of the expos I've worked within Australia," he says. "I feel like some of the bigger expos are taking advantage of artists — often providing the bare minimum whilst charging the most."
It's a sentiment you hear often from working tattooists — usually in the back of a car on the way home from an event, when everyone's tired enough to be honest. The expo as a transactional exercise. Artists as ticket-sale mechanisms. Punters as foot traffic. The kind of event where the atmosphere happens despite the organisers, not because of them. You can usually tell which kind you're at when something breaks and nobody can find whoever's running the show.
The idea for The Rainforest & Reef Invitational (@rainforestandreefinvitational) crystallised over dinner with his friend Sam Kane (@samkanetattoo) from Great White Tattoo (@great_white_tattoo), after a flash day at the Be Social music festival in October 2025. Jake had been talking about doing something like this for years — the way everyone in every industry is always about to start a thing. That dinner was the night he stopped talking and got to work.
The choice of Cairns was never strategic. It was personal.
"I grew up in this region and I've lived here for a long time," he says. "The closest other tattoo expo is in Brisbane and it made perfect sense to have one in the far north. People up here love getting tattooed and it's got a great tattoo culture. It's also nice to get to show my friends within the tattoo industry my little part of the world."
I can vouch for that last part. Watching tattooists from Victoria, New South Wales and the Northern Territory encounter Far North Queensland for the first time — the winter light, the rainforest pressing up against the edge of the city, the reef an hour away — was one of the quieter pleasures of the weekend. Some of these were people who, a few years back, had asked George and me why we kept coming up here to guest. By Sunday a few of them were quietly mentioning they might bring their partners up for a holiday. Might do a cheeky guest spot while they were at it.
Alex Pini (@pindeazl) knew the answer already. She'd come up from the Northern Territory, but Cairns was where she started her tattoo career. "A huge incentive for me was to come back to where my career started," she says. For her the trip carried something a capital-city convention centre can't manufacture: personal history. A reason to be in this specific city beyond the fact that an event happened to be booked there.
What Happens When You Skip the Competition
The Rainforest & Reef Invitational ran on June 6th and 7th, 2026, at the Cairns Showgrounds. Forty-five artists and vendors. No competitions. No PA system. Walk-ins only. Entry priced to be accessible rather than extractive.
Every one of those decisions pushed deliberately against the standard format — and the most pointed was the absence of any competition.
"You know what comps do for our industry? They divide us," Jake says. "People get their hopes up on winning a trophy and they get let down and hurt if their tattoo doesn't place. It causes resentment and upset. I will never have a tattoo competition at one of my expos for the sole reason I want every tattooer and punter to be happy and not feel like they aren't good enough."
I've watched the alternative play out. The tension that settles over an expo floor when there's a trophy on the line — artists a little more guarded, the collaborative atmosphere tightening into something competitive and faintly joyless. I've heard the horror stories too: judges walking the floor, stopping in front of a fresh tattoo, and saying out loud, in front of the person now wearing it for the rest of their life, "what is that?" "That's not good". The competition format at its worst treats the people who came to get tattooed — the ones who said yes to a permanent decision and trusted someone with it — as props in somebody else's trophy hunt. Rainforest & Reef had none of it. What it had instead was the loose, easy energy of a room where nobody was trying to beat anybody.
The artists felt the difference immediately. Pete Pav (@pete_pav) came up from Victoria having largely given up on the major city shows. Too big, he says. Full of massive egos. The kind of environment that slowly grinds down whatever made you want to start tattooing in the first place. He'd met Jake when Jake came to guest at his studio, Forest Creek Tattoo (@forestcreektattoo) in Castlemaine, and the invitation to Cairns had felt different to the usual expo pitch — personal, considered, coming from someone he actually knew. "When he messaged me it was really nice to put a face to the convention," Pete says.
"It felt small and more personal. This felt more like a bunch of mates having a tatt party."
He'd later call it, flatly, the best experience he'd ever had at a convention.
Matt Fleetwood — Fleety (@fleetytattoos) — came up from New South Wales and clocked the infrastructure. "Being supplied with beds, trolleys and the most spacious booth I've ever had for an expo really shows that they care about the entire experience," he says. "The way that the team set this expo up and worked so damn hard all weekend was some S-tier service." He made friends for life on the trip, he adds. Not acquaintances. Friends. Fleety's verdict was even shorter than Pete's: "the perfect tattoo expo."
For some, the personal nature of the thing wasn't just a nice touch — it was a first. Anna Day (@anna_day) — a deeply respected dotwork, geometric and ornamental artist with more than twenty years in the trade — told me this was the first expo of her entire career where she'd received a direct invitation, and that it had come from a tattooer she held in high regard made it an honour rather than a transaction. That's the part the big shows miss: she'd rather pay into a project run by someone directly involved in the craft than feed a faceless corporate event team enterprising off creatives. The smaller scale wasn't a compromise either — it solved problems the big rooms create. No long treks across a convention floor to cut a stencil, no copy-room bottleneck with the machines worn to bits by a hundred tattooers. Just, as she put it, fun tattoos and good socials.
Emma Marentes (@tattoosbyemma) named the other thing the weekend exposed: how starved the regions are for this. Disillusioned with the state of east-coast conventions and living regional herself, she jumped at the chance to work a smaller tattooer-run show — and the hunger was obvious in who came through the doors. Not browsers. Punters who wanted to get tattooed. A huge share of her work was walk-ins, including some seriously large pieces — the kind of commitment she says city walk-in crowds, squeezed by cost of living, rarely make anymore. By four o'clock Sunday she still hadn't had a moment to look around. She'd been that busy. Busier, she reckons, than at the big shows.
The lineup itself reflected something I noticed across the weekend and only fully understood when I asked Jake about it afterwards. He hadn't booked for follower counts or social reach. He'd booked people he knew personally — artists he'd worked alongside, guested with, hosted at Royal Blue. Humble, craft-first, in it for reasons that had nothing to do with building a personal brand.
"It's strange that people merit how good a tattooer is on the number of followers on Instagram," Jake says. "I'd invited them all personally because I knew them all. Each and every one of them are amazing at what they do — but they're also in it for the right reasons, which is important to me."
The work that came out of that floor across two days was exceptional. That's not luck, and it's not the Cairns fluoride-free water. That's curation.
They Queued Two Hours Early for the Wrong Time
Day one surprised everyone — including us.
There was no real way to predict how it would go. No website. No ticketing. No pre-sales to read the room from. Just posters around town, a couple of local news mentions, and word of mouth doing the rest — pure IYKYK energy, the marketing equivalent of a flyer stapled to a power pole. So when a queue formed at 8am, it caught everyone off guard. The doors weren't even until 10am — the venue had advertised the wrong time — but the queue, undeterred, had decided that waiting two extra hours for Cairns' first tattoo expo was a reasonable use of a winter morning. They were not wrong.
During load-in I'd tried to tell the visiting artists and vendors what was coming. I know FNQ locals. I know how they respond when something good lands in their city — with an enthusiasm and an appetite that tends to catch outsiders off guard. Cairns people love a market, love handmade things, love a reason to put on a good shirt and leave the house. The visiting artists nodded along the way you nod at a local who's clearly biased about his own town. Then the doors opened, and they stopped nodding and started taking bookings.
What came through wasn't just the tattooed and the curious. It was everyone. Children. Elderly people. People with disabilities. Parents who brought their kids and stood with them in front of flash art while the kids stared at it with that specific expression of something being new and strange and completely fascinating. People who had never been to a tattoo expo — not because they weren't interested, but because the nearest one was a thousand kilometres and a flight away, and that's an expense that prices people out entirely.
Here's the detail that stuck with me, because it sums up the whole thing better than any quote could. In the lead-up, the crew had each posted a little introduction — names, roles, a few favourite things. I'd listed my food of choice as white Monster, mostly as a joke (even if it is 100% true). On day one a punter I had never met in my life sought me out on the floor and handed me a stack of them — plus a Blue Hawaii flavour, in the spirit of the expo's tropical theme. A total stranger. Who'd read a crew post, clocked a throwaway detail, and decided to do something properly kind with it. You don't get that at a convention centre in a capital city. You get it here, because here people show up for each other. (Roskozi — if you're reading this, the debt is noted, the caffeine was metabolised, and you single-handedly fuelled the last few working brain cells that retained enough to write this article).
Rob, a local getting tattooed by Gareth (@garethtattoos), put it plainly. "Living in far north Queensland the isolation from events like that is real. The added expense for travel and accommodation has put attending them out of reach for me." He found Gareth through the expo's socials, fired off a few DMs, and showed up booked in for a custom piece. He was unambiguous about what it meant to him: if the expo didn't exist, neither did that tattoo. "I can't justify it," he says of the travel. Then, unprompted: "I'm truly grateful and proud to get behind and support such hard working, passionate people."
Letitia had never been to a tattoo expo either. "I don't get out of Cairns very much," she says. She got tattooed by Zenobia (@zenobiatattoos) and booked in for flash from Melody Crow (@melodycrowtattoos) — both artists she discovered just by walking through the doors. That's the destination expo proposition at its most fundamental: bring the thing to the people, and they show up. Not just the converted. Everyone.
Even people who travelled for it found something the big shows had quietly stopped offering. Jimmy Judge (@jimmyjudge_) came up from the Gold Coast — a content creator who's been to most of the major Australian expos, so he has something to measure it against — and rated this one above all of them. "I honestly think the smaller scale makes it more intimate and a lot easier to meet everyone, as it's less chaotic," he says. "That was the most enjoyable experience I've ever had at a tattoo show — and I've been to most of the major ones."
Vendors ran out of stock. Prints and original artwork sold to people who'd never bought tattoo art before, genuinely thrilled to take something home knowing they'd got it at Cairns' first tattoo expo. Walk-in-only artists were maxed out by midday and taking bookings for day two. The floor had the unmistakable energy of something that had been waiting a long time to exist and had finally found its moment.
Tristan, a Cairns local, wandered in with no plan and left with a traditional crocodile from Jamie Randall (@jamierandalltattoo), snuck in forty minutes before closing on day one. "Things just worked out," he says. He'd followed Jamie on Instagram but planned nothing. Sometimes the expo just works like that — the right artist, the right moment, a small patch of skin and a shared decision that something should go there.
The local artists who came through as visitors felt it too. Gracie (@gracie.tattoos) from Dusk and Bloom Studio (@duskandbloomstudio) said the thing that became the unofficial thesis of the entire weekend: "I think the culture was already here. We just needed someone to bring it together."
Tia (@batstat2) from Muse Fine Line (@muse.finelinetattoo) was already thinking past the weekend. "It's great for locals to experience something different without having to travel. Even parents bringing their kids along and seeing how interested they were — that has such a positive effect on the industry, having all sorts of different ages involved." Her colleague Claudia (@merkentattoo), watching the floor with the appreciation of someone who makes things herself, summed it up the way you'd want a first-timer to. "Everyone was so lovely and talented. It helps you fall in love even more with this craft. Plus — how fun was it."
Some People Were Mad About It
Not everyone was happy before the doors opened.
Jake had made a call for the first year: no local Cairns artists in the exhibitor lineup, with one exception — Zuzz, from his own shop. The reasoning was straightforward. There are so many good local artists that including some and not others would have been unfair to the rest. On paper, a considered and reasonable position. In practice, it didn't land that way with everyone.
"We had multiple abusive messages and comments from the owners of other tattoo shops in town," Jake says.
"And it's nice to know where they stand, because I refuse to be bullied, intimidated or abused. Our expo is about growing tattooing and pressing forward — leaving all the negative people and ideals within our industry behind."
George and I caught a taste of it ourselves, putting up posters around town in the lead-up. Some of the pushback came from a place that was equal parts anxiety, territorialism, and a particular kind of FOMO — not being invited to something and feeling entitled to it on the basis of being from here. Something new appears in your city, doesn't quite fit the existing order, and the uncertainty curdles into hostility. But hostility is still hostility, however you dress it up, and Jake — to his enormous credit — declined to take the bait, which is more than can be said for the shop owners typing furious messages about an event they were also, somehow, mad they weren't invited to.
One local artist put it to us directly: tell me, how would putting a poster in my shop and promoting something I'm not invited to benefit the local tattoo community? — followed by a row of laughing emojis, the universal punctuation of someone who thinks they've landed a point. But strip the smugness away and it's not really a question. It's a statement, and the statement is: I feel left out, so I won't help. Which, as it happens, is exactly the attitude that doesn't earn an invite. Because the question answers itself the moment you look at what an expo like this actually does for the place it lands in. New Plymouth is the proof up the road (or down it — a hop, a skip, across the Tasman and then down a bit more, if you're checking a map): a destination expo that put a small New Zealand city on the international tattoo map and has been feeding its local scene ever since. The visiting artists who fall for a town come back to guest, and those guest spots earn the local studios money. The tourism dollars land in cafes, pubs and accommodation across the setup week and the weekend. The punters who wander in and don't get tattooed on the day leave inspired — and book into a Cairns studio a month later. And every grandparent who walks the floor and sees kids, families and ordinary people celebrating the craft goes home with a slightly rewritten idea of what a tattooer is: less the criminal-and-gang-member stereotype some of them grew up with, more a working artist who's part of the community. You don't have to be in the lineup to benefit from any of that. You just have to want the thing to exist.
Jake was watching all of this. Across the setup days and the weekend, quietly clocking which local artists came through the doors to support, which studios engaged with what was being built — and which ones sent angry messages from behind a screen. "We went into this to see who locally would come out and support the show," he says. "It was a perfect way to find out who's interested in being part of our community."
The answer, by Sunday, was a good one. George was the only local tattooist actually working the floor — volunteering her time as crew in an already packed schedule, wrapping fences and running the floor across both days. (Jake later called her the MVP of the whole build. As her husband I am the least objective person alive on the subject — but having watched her single-handedly wrap most of a showground's worth of fencing, I'm inclined to agree.) The rest of the locals came through as punters and supporters, drifting between booths, striking up conversations with interstate artists, talking guest spots and collaborations. Claudia from Muse Fine Line had the most generous read of anyone. "I fully trusted Jake's vision and motives for how he organised everything. Yes, it would've been nice to participate, but I got to enjoy it a lot regardless." The longer-term payoff she identified — visiting artists now knowing the city, knowing the studios, having a reason to come back and guest — is a gift that keeps giving long after the marquees come down. The expo as a seed, not just an event.
Next year, the locals get invites. Jake confirmed it. The ones who showed up and supported are the ones who'll hear from him first.
Built Like a Gig, Run Like One Too
There was no website. There was barely a plan you could print out, and certainly no marketing budget worth the name. What there was instead was guerrilla — posters around town, George and I doing ground runs, word of mouth carrying most of the weight, socials run by people who actually cared whether anyone walked through the door rather than people chasing impressions. Jake has a name for the whole approach.
"I remember the punk and metal shows we grew up with," he says.
"I kinda feel we tapped into that nostalgia with our expo. It was gritty, fun and exciting. I never wanted this to be a big corporate hoo-ha. There's so much more soul when it's DIY and punk rock."
He doesn't need to explain it to me. I grew up in the same FNQ scene he did. I've set up enough shows in enough rooms up here to know the exact feeling he's describing — the gig that exists purely because a handful of people decided it should, then built it with their own hands and their own time and whatever budget they could scrape together (usually at a loss — that's the reality of it; you do it for the fun, not the figures). The difference between a production and something assembled. Between polish and soul.
The DIY ethos of the FNQ music scene and the DIY ethos of independent tattooing are the same impulse wearing different clothes. You build the thing yourself, because nobody else is going to build it for you — and because doing it yourself is the only way to be sure it comes out right.
That's exactly what Rainforest & Reef felt like from the inside. Not slick. Assembled. The seams visible if you looked closely, and not one person in that room caring, because the thing worked, the floor was full, and the work going onto skin was some of the best you'd see anywhere in the country.
The Bit Where Everyone Runs on Fumes
Day two was quieter in volume — though only slightly, and not for lack of demand. Several booths shut early for the best possible reason: they'd run out of day. Sold out, fully booked, no skin left to tattoo. The floor stayed full. The work stayed exceptional. Working as crew meant no real chance to sit for a tattoo myself — a specific kind of torture when you're surrounded by some of the best work you've seen all year. Pete Pav fixed that, briefly: freehand/machine walk-in swallows, ten minutes flat. Mine took five. Watching him work was watching someone for whom the machine long ago stopped being a tool and became an extension of how he thinks — clean, fast, unhesitating. (George got one too. After more than ten years together, our first matching tattoos, snuck in between jobs at a showground.)
Then it was over, and the real measure of what had been built became obvious in reverse. Pack-down took four hours. Two days to build, four hours to erase. Nobody made the rules fair. Everyone was running on fumes. Jake and Kaarina, somehow, were still going, still visibly proud of the thing they'd pulled off. The consensus from the artists across the weekend was unprompted and unanimous: best tattoo expo in the country.
Drew, of Obsidian Tattoo, didn't hedge it at all — hands down the best convention he's ever been to or been part of, he reckons, crediting Jake and Kaarina for hand-picking the lineup. He singled out the same thing everyone else kept circling back to: with no competition running, artists had more time to actually tattoo, hang out and enjoy the weekend, instead of watching the clock to rush off and compete. He'd met Jake, in his telling, "in the deep trenches of a dungeon in Brisbane," and the two had clicked as brothers on the spot — which is as good an origin story for an invitation as any. His verdict on whether other artists should make the trip if they ever get the chance: "Bloody oath."
Alex Pini, who'd come back to where her career began, said the weekend had given her "one of the best experiences of my entire career" — and that it had reignited her passion for the craft. Sit with that word for a second. Not inspired. Reignited. For someone who's been at this long enough for the fire to dim a little, worn down by the circuit and the machinery of the industry, to have it come roaring back at a first-year event in a city the rest of the country forgets exists — that is not a small thing. That's the whole thing, actually.
The Quiet After the Loud
The day after, Jake and Kaarina hosted a barbecue at their place for the artists and crew still in town.
The standout guest was Jake's dog, Dahlia — Dolly — who'd worked out early that people were helping themselves to food from the table and made the reasonable executive decision that this policy extended to her. She spent the evening rearing up on her hind legs to liberate whatever she could reach. "Very funny and a bit naughty," Jake says — in the tone of a man who is mostly proud of his dog. Correctly.
At some point Jake took a few of us through his home, and it told you everything the expo already had. The walls and shelves are a lifetime's collection — tattoo artwork, flash, memorabilia and oddities gathered from all over the world across years on the road. It's the home of someone who didn't just build a career in this industry but fell completely in love with it, and never fell out. You don't assemble a collection like that for show. You assemble it because you can't help yourself.
That, in the end, is the thing the whole weekend ran on. Not strategy. Not a business plan. A genuine, unembarrassed love for tattooing and the people who make it — expressed as a two-day event in a regional showground, built by hand, run like a punk show, and held together by the same obsessive care you could see hanging on his walls.
"Very surreal and nice to get to hang out with everyone socially," Jake says of the BBQ. The understatement of someone too close to it to fully see what he'd done.
Coming Back, Whether You Like It or Not
Rainforest & Reef is coming back.
"We are so ready to bring the Rainforest & Reef Invitational back to Cairns for 2027," Jake says. He wants a few more friends who missed out this year. He wants local Cairns artists in the mix. He wants to keep it small, exclusive, made for the artists. Beyond that, he's honest about not knowing exactly what it becomes.
"Ideally I want to keep the heart and soul of the expo alive and have it be something really special for our little community of tattoo artists."
It's a genuinely strange problem to navigate. Every artist who worked it wants back in — but he wants fresh faces too. Make it bigger and risk losing what made it work? Hold the line and disappoint people trying to get in? There's no clean answer, and he knows it. What he won't budge on is the foundation. No competitions. Personal invitations. DIY spirit. The artists and the punters ahead of the optics, every time.
The best argument for any of it didn't come from Jake, or a visiting artist, or me. It came from a punter. Tristan — traditional crocodile from Jamie Randall, snuck in forty minutes before close — had been to plenty of expos as a client but never anything like this one. His verdict afterwards was simple: "After Rainforest & Reef I'm definitely keen to check out more expo experiences."
Someone who arrived with no plan and left wanting more of the thing he'd just found. That's the whole case for what Jake built, in a single sentence, from someone with no reason to say it except that it happened to be true.
Because that's what an expo like this does, when it's run by someone who cares more about the room than the receipts. It doesn't just put on a show. It widens the circle — reaching the kid staring at flash art for the first time, the grandparent quietly revising a forty-year-old assumption, the local artist who lands a guest spot out of it next year, the punter who wanders in curious and walks out booked. Cairns had the culture all along. The appetite, the artists, the community waiting for a reason to gather. It just took someone willing to wrap the fences himself to prove it.
See you in 2027, Rainforest & Reef.
Jake Straat (@straats_tatts) owns Royal Blue Tattoo (@royalbluetattoo) in Cairns and co-hosts Rats Get Fat Podcast (@ratsgetfatpodcast) with Zuzz Rains (@zuzz_royal). Rainforest & Reef Invitational (@rainforestandreefinvitational) returns to Cairns in 2027.
