Kathy Hartman and Bill Hartman are the owners of The Body Art Training Group. Kathy's expertise is in body art safety and Bill's is in curriculum development.

This website is the latest chapter in a story that began in 1997. Kathy Hartman, then a health inspector for the San Diego County Department of Environment Health, was assigned to a district that included tattoo shops. After many conversations with body artists, she realized that San Diego's tattoo ordinance needed to be updated, and that quality training was needed for both health inspectors and body art professionals.

Kathy responded to the comments and requests of the local body art community and quickly organized training for the other health inspectors in her department. She also began working to update San Diego County's tattoo ordinance, and to get statewide body art laws established.

In 1998, the California Conference of Local Health Officers asked Kathy to write the standards for tattooing, body piercing, and the application of permanent cosmetics called for in California Assembly Bill 186. Kathy was then contracted by the California Department of Health Services, to write the Initial Statement of Reasons, the Fiscal Impact Statement, and to change the standards into regulatory language. This work has provided the foundation for the current Safe Body Art Act (AB 223).

Later in 1998, Kathy held a body art industry outreach meeting for the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health to find out what local shop owners thought needed to be done to improve the local body art program. Cathy Montie, owner of Absolute Tattoo, was at that first outreach meeting. The two women soon discovered that they were both deeply interested in body art safety, and began to work together to improve inspector and artist training.

In 2003, Kathy Hartman and Cathy Montie helped start the California Alliance for the Promotion of Safe Body Art (CAPSBA), a non-profit 501(c) (3) organization. CAPSBA's mission was to provide high quality, affordable safety training to both body art professionals and health inspectors.

Between 2004 and 2008, under the leadership of Kathy and Cathy, CAPSBA partnered with the California Environmental Health Association and the Counties of San Diego, Monterey, San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz to help improve body art safety in the State of California by holding annual, all-day body art safety seminars throughout California.

In 2007, Kathy Hartman, Bill Hartman, and Cathy Montie began giving bloodborne pathogens training seminars at the Body Art Expo Shows produced by Mega Productions. They have provided training to students in California, Colorado, Nevada, Illinois, and Texas.

In 2010 they went to Shanghai, China where they taught a full-day safety class as part of a three-day tattoo seminar.

All of these activities have led Kathy and Bill Hartman to write the next chapter in this story by starting the Body Art Training Group website.

This site is designed to offer online classes and publications from a variety of providers and to provide high quality training that is affordable, convenient, and easy to use. To accomplish this, Kathy and Bill know they can't do it all themselves.

So, if you are an experienced and knowledgeable body art professional who has an interest in writing a course or publication about body art, please contact Kathy and Bill for more information by clicking here.