Evolved Body Art wrestles with accountability

In January 2025, an employee of Evolved Body Art typed and printed a letter informing the leadership of their immediate resignation, placing the note on the communal table in the basement of the Summit Street shop. 

“For most of the three years I have worked here, I have felt unsafe inside and outside around my job here,” wrote the worker. “There is no reason I should be cornered and forced to kiss a coworker, or have my shirt pulled down and made to reveal myself to coworkers or shown my coworkers’ genitals nonconsensually. … I am no longer tolerating this or the minimal changes after my expressions of discomfort.” (Matter News was unable to confirm whether these incidents occurred.)

Brett Burleigh II, a former Evolved employee of nearly five years, said he discovered the note in the early morning hours prior to the start of his shift and proceeded to both photocopy and photograph the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Matter News. He then distributed the image to coworkers at all three Evolved locations, including Summit Street, Old North, and the University District.

“I was like, this is going to conveniently get forgotten about or swept under the rug, so … let’s send it to the outside world,” Burleigh told Matter News, saying the letter was the final straw leading to his departure from Evolved weeks later. “I had heard rumors about this, that, or the other for a couple of years, but … the story would get told to someone maybe in the front of the house, who tells a piercer, and that piercer tells a tattooer, and that tattooer tells me, where I’m hearing it fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth hand. … [The letter] was the first time I heard something, boom, straight from the horse’s mouth.”

The contents of the letter sparked a series of weeks-long conversations between numerous current and former Evolved workers, according to multiple people interviewed. And in early April, one now-former employee read from a prepared statement during a staff gathering at the Summit Street location in which they called out what they described as a history of inappropriate behavior within the shop enabled and perpetrated by owner Nick Wolak. 

In interviews with Matter News, 15 former Evolved staff members alleged among other concerns that Wolak had appeared nude in front of employees during social gatherings outside of the shop, made sexually explicit jokes or comments, invited an outside speaker into the business whose conversation was inappropriate for a workplace setting, kept one person on staff even when their actions routinely left others fearful of their safety, and allowed a tattoo artist to install a motion-activated hidden camera in their Summit Street tattooing station – a decision multiple former employees interviewed by Matter News described as a privacy issue and a potential breach of client trust. 

In a Jan. 2 interview at Evolved on Summit Street, Wolak told Matter News he let the worker install the camera to address claims of inventory theft from their station. “I can say the camera was never on during open hours, and there were never any clients filmed, or intended to be filmed, by that camera,” said Wolak, who added that the camera was in place for only “three or four days” before its removal. Wolak also acknowledged having previously apologized to an employee for making a gesture she described as being of a sexual nature, defended his staffing decisions as the byproduct of negotiating the “different personalities” that inhabit the shop, and noted that while he doesn’t have a problem with nudity, “I wouldn’t say it’s part of the work culture.”

A week after the April staff meeting, Wolak made a since-deleted public post to his personal Facebook page. “It has been a full seven days, and I am still in shock,” Wolak wrote. “I have been reading, listening to, and working to understand the impact of situation after situation. … As many know, former members of the Evolved Body Art team have come forward with heartbreaking allegations related to their employment here at the shop. I want to take this opportunity to assure our employees, both current and former, as well as our clients and beloved community, that we are putting in the work to make Evolved Body Art better from the ground up.”

Wolak said in January that immediately following the April meeting he brought in a third-party firm to conduct an investigation into the employee claims. Evolved shared the results of this investigation in a detailed update headlined “Accountability” and posted to the business’ website in September, writing: “The investigation concluded that while there are, like in most workplaces, opportunities to improve in several areas, there was no clear indication of systemic abuse or misconduct.”

The post also documented a number of steps the company said it took beginning in April, including: the publication of a robust employee handbook created by Evolved’s HR firm, which includes directions for reporting workplace concerns to a neutral third party; the initiation of thorough background checks on all new hires; and staff participation in “nearly 100 hours of training and counsel on human resources, consent, substance abuse, and business management.” 

In addition to commissioning an investigation, Evolved also brought in an outside firm to establish and run an HR department – a development Wolak acknowledged struggling with, having long associated personnel departments with massive, comparatively buttoned-up entities such as Ohio State University, Starbucks, and Ford Motor Company, he said in the interview, and not independently owned businesses staffed by what he described as a wildly divergent collection of fringe personalities. 

“Up until April, I thought we were doing a good job of … balancing the kookiness and all these artists,” Wolak said in January. “Artists are so individual and so unique and so creative, and sometimes so heartbroken and problematic, and not wanting and not able to fit in. And so, to have us all together under one roof, under one banner, it’s really tricky, and it’s really beautiful when it works. So, I don’t know. We’re doing the HR thing now. And we’re doing it wholeheartedly. And I don’t know that it feels natural yet, but we’re taking accountability for a shortcoming of ours, and we’re addressing it the best we can.”

Before she spoke at the April meeting, reading from a nine-page letter that she also printed and distributed to staff members, another now-former employee said she had previously considered taking similar public action on multiple occasions. The woman, who asked not to be named for fear of professional repercussions and will be identified by the pseudonym Samantha, said the first instance occurred after she said Wolak directed a gesture of a sexual nature toward her during a staff meeting. 

Both Samantha and Wolak said that incident led him to send her a handwritten apology letter in February 2021, a copy of which was obtained by Matter News. “It is embarrassing for me to think that I/we say that Evolved is a safe place to work and to visit and that I personally do not, or maybe cannot, live up to those ideals,” Wolak wrote. 

“That letter was me taking accountability,” Wolak said in January. “I had so many people say, ‘Nick, that letter is exactly what you’re supposed to do.’ But I guess it wasn’t enough, or I guess it didn’t land right.”

Samantha said a second incident took place when Wolak invited a guest into the shop to discuss issues of consent with the staff, a session in which Samantha said the speaker instructed employees on different ways they could verbally flirt with one another.

“And she said, ‘I like my tits complimented,’ and I was like, ‘What the fuck did this woman just say?’” said Samantha, whose account of the meeting was supported by other interviews. “And I’m looking around like, ‘Why isn’t anyone speaking out?’” 

Asked by Matter News in January about this event, Wolak said the speaker’s overall message centered on consent and that he had no prior knowledge of the language they would use in the course of their discussion, adding, “Either fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of consent educators are sex positive or come from a sex-positive background.”

Multiple former staffers interviewed also said that Wolak had appeared nude in front of them during social gatherings outside of the shop, including within the sauna at his home. And one person interviewed described Wolak’s casual approach to nudity by recalling what one longtime Evolved tattoo boss told them: “He said, ‘I’ve got a personal theory that if I don’t see Nick’s dick once a year, I’m fucking fired.’”

“He was so pedestrian with being naked in front of all of us,” said Burleigh, who relayed a story about attending a group paintball outing with a number of Evolved workers that concluded with Wolak asking who might “run the gauntlet,” challenging anyone in the group to sprint across an open field while others shot at them from above. “And no one was really down for it, but Nick was, and he was like, ‘Fuck it. I’ll strip down naked and run across.’” 

“Technically, I think I ran the gauntlet in my underwear. It was supposed to be naked, and I dropped trou, and one dude was like, ‘No, no, no. Not that type of naked,’” said Wolak, who added that he generally doesn’t see “anything wrong with nudity” but that he had never before been confronted with these claims, which several former workers framed in terms of the power imbalance at play, noting Wolak’s status as both boss and business owner. “There were so many other fun things that happened that day. … And I didn’t realize anyone felt different until now, and that gives me something to reflect on.”

“It’s interesting, because if you read any of these management books, or take any of these classes, a lot of it is about building a team culture and doing outside team-building and bonding activities,” he continued. “And these last nine months have almost felt like that was the problem.”

All of the former employees interviewed described a work environment at Evolved that they said could be at times volatile, with most citing as one reason Wolak’s willingness to extend second chances in his hiring practices. While in many instances, this provided people with complex histories a necessary toehold to begin to turn their lives around, those interviewed said, in other cases it introduced staffers whose behaviors repeatedly left their coworkers feeling threatened or otherwise ill at ease. 

“It’s about forgiveness, right?” Wolak said. “I don’t want to be too cheesy or too whatever, but we work our whole life to be better people, I think. And part of that is forgiving ourselves. Part of that is forgiving others. Part of it’s not judging people. There’s a very famous tattoo that you’ll see, and a lot of times it’s on the neck, and it’s of praying hands, sometimes with the rosary, and it says, ‘Only God can judge me.’ We’ve had so many different personalities come through here, and they don’t all get along, and they don’t all work well together, and that’s part of our addition and subtraction process.”

Similar claims also extended to Trauma, a yearly ticketed fetish party founded and run by Wolak in his personal capacity – an event that draws heavily from the tattoo and piercing communities of which Evolved is a part. In coordinating Trauma, multiple people interviewed said that Wolak never established or maintained an attendee banned list – something that one person associated with the kink community described as an essential safeguard in an environment where consent and personal safety are paramount – and that the event routinely welcomed back people who had displayed harmful or abusive behaviors. 

“There was never any official documentation,” Wolak told Matter News when asked about the lack of a banned list at Trauma, saying that certain people who were allowed to return had “done the work” in the intervening years, whether having received counselling or taken part in mediation. “I don’t want to say anyone’s individual stories, but we’re all these complicated humans, and we all have different needs and wants and desires, and we all have different boundaries.”

In interviews, eight former staffers raised concerns specific to one longtime Evolved tattoo artist whose name Matter News is withholding because none of his coworkers reported any of the alleged incidents to law enforcement. Multiple former employees recalled numerous occasions in which the man Matter News has given the pseudonym Dylan either threatened physical violence or screamed in people’s faces, and one person interviewed said they quit their job at Evolved owing to what they described as Wolak’s refusal to dismiss the tattoo artist for repeatedly violating shop policies.

“The entire time [Dylan] was there, he was disruptive, and Nick [Wolak] constantly defended him. … He was absolutely adamant this guy be given an opportunity,” said former employee Katrina Polacek.

Following a 2022 altercation with Dylan in which the tattooer initiated a screaming match and then challenged him to fight, former employee Joe Langley said he brought his concerns to Wolak, telling the owner that Dylan needed to “either be reined in or fired.” In response, Langley said, Wolak placed part of the blame on Langley for even raising the issue with management. “[Wolak] said I could have ‘karmatically written this off into the universe,’ were his exact words,” Langley said.

“The main thing I want to say about [Dylan] is that he was let go at some point when it was not something that we could handle,” Wolak said. “And should it have happened sooner? Maybe, possibly, I don’t know.”

In 2023, a few months after Dylan’s employment with Evolved had been terminated, the tattooist was arrested on charges of abduction, domestic violence and strangulation or suffocation. He later pleaded guilty to charges of strangulation and domestic violence and was sentenced to probation, according to court records obtained by Matter News.

The issues with Dylan also extended to clients at Evolved, according to multiple people interviewed by Matter News, who said that he would access the personal information of female customers and then contact them outside of work – an issue four people said Wolak raised in staff meetings. (Wolak declined to address the specifics of these accusations when asked about them by Matter News in January.)

“We had one staff meeting where Nick said, ‘We cannot sleep with our clients,’ and [Dylan] made it very obvious it was directed at him, because he was like, ‘Well, in every other job you can sleep with your client,” said a former employee being identified by the pseudonym Sara. 

Dylan did not respond to multiple interview requests from Matter News.

Numerous people interviewed by Matter News said Wolak not only overlooked the chaos Dylan introduced but also at times appeared to welcome the tension, with six former workers saying that Wolak commonly spoke of Dylan having “heyókȟa energy,” a Native American term used to describe a person who does things backwards to provoke thought or laughter. “If the river current is going this way,” Burleigh said, “he’s the one duck that goes upstream.”

Asked by Matter News about the term heyókȟa and if his embrace of the concept helped him to rationalize keeping Dylan on staff, Wolak declined to elaborate, saying, “That’s more of a spiritual belief, and I don’t know if this is the right context to [discuss] that.” The owner did, however, say that he remains a strong believer in offering people second chances.

Those interviewed by Matter News frequently traced this willingness to what they described as Wolak’s own decades-long evolution, with multiple former workers describing the younger Wolak as significantly more rough-and-tumble – a characterization from which Wolak didn’t shy. 

“I was more rough-and-tumble, and I lived through a lot of things in life, and I learned from them,” he said. “It’s kind of funny this happened to me now, because compared to 30 years ago, I have done a lot of work. And I love to do that work. I’m not saying, ‘Woe is me.’ I’m saying I had a lot of work to do. I did the work. Now I have a new list of work to do. I’m doing the work.”

The majority of people interviewed by Matter News said the allegations that surfaced in the April staff meeting were particularly upsetting given that Evolved Body Art long ago adopted a mission statement posted both online and on printed signage visible within each location, which reads, in part, “It is our mission to be consistently friendly, helpful, and respectful to all clients, co-workers, and our community.”

“We spent so much time throughout the years pushing that Evolved mission statement. And I put them on such a high pedestal, thinking, well this place is completely different,” said one former worker. Another former employee said the mission statement allowed Evolved to present as “being very queer friendly, very feminist, and progressive, when in reality” it was not. 

One former employee said the mission statement dated to 2002 or ’03. Wolak, for his part, couldn’t remember precisely when Evolved adopted its mission statement, recalling only that it came about in discussions between staff members and “was designed to attract the people … who resonate with it.” 

“I think we’ve employed more of all the demographics you listed (women, queer folks, people of color) than any other tattoo shop I know,” Wolak said. “And I think we continue to. I think that is us. And we are that community.”

Multiple people interviewed for this story questioned the sincerity of the efforts undertaken by at least some within Evolved, pointing as evidence to a photograph that began to circulate a couple of months after the September accountability update was posted online. Taken in late October at Trauma, hosted last year as a private, invite-only event in the wake of the allegations surfaced against the tattoo shop, the photograph shows five people, including Evolved’s general manager, dressed in costume as “resistance” Care Bears, the stomach of each imprinted with a different symbol championing a social justice cause, such as  abortion rights and trans acceptance.

Three people interviewed said they interpreted the group’s decision to wear these costumes as a purposeful attempt to minimize or belittle the claims made by the former employees, who used a cartoon photo of the same Care Bears as the banner image for an April GoFundMe. Launched the same time the claims against the shop went public, the fundraiser was aimed at providing a financial bridge to those workers who left Evolved as a result of the allegations. 

“They love to have a mean inside joke to bond over,” said Samantha, who added later in an email that she selected the banner image for the fundraiser in part because going public required bravery “and ‘Care Bears stare’ … was a [phrase] my childhood best friend (RIP) and I would say when we needed more courage.”

“That was not my decision at all,” Wolak said of the costumes. He added that the people in the photo could have been utilizing humor as a means to process events of the last year. “Laughing instead of crying is a thing,” he said.

These lingering fractures highlight the bigger questions that have continued to surface nearly 11 months after the controversy first ignited within the shop, namely, who determines when a person or a business has made the proper amends for past missteps? How long does that process take? And what does it even mean to be accountable?

“That’s a good question,” Wolak said. “That’s probably the million-dollar question, at least for this story. For me, it’s just looking at what happened, and looking at it from different perspectives I hadn’t seen before. … [It’s] trying to feel what a person feels, putting yourself in their position, and asking, ‘How could I have done better for each of those people?’ … It’s about taking responsibility for our imperfections, for our flaws, for where we went wrong, and then … trying to make things better.”