Built by people who sat in the chair.
Tattoo Studio Insurance by NRG began the way most good things in this trade do — because the existing options were not good enough. We are the specialist arm of NRG Insurance — an independent, owner led brokerage in Seattle — and we cover one thing: body art.
For years, artists and studios were handed insurance built for nail bars and corner shops — forms that excluded the very act of tattooing, call center lines that had never heard of a healed result dispute, and risk advisors who treated a busy street shop like a liability to be survived rather than a craft to be understood.
So NRG built a program with the artists, not at them. We sat with piercers, microblading specialists and shop owners. We read the exclusions out loud. We rewrote the parts that failed the trade — and we kept the parts that protected it. The result is a brokerage that speaks ink fluently and answers the phone when it matters most.
Four marks we work by
Specialism over scale
We would rather be the best at one trade than mediocre at a thousand. Body art is all we write.
Plainspoken insurance
If we cannot explain a clause to you in a sentence, we have not done our job. No fine print as a trap.
Loyalty to the artist
We shop the insurance marketplace and stand between you and price increases.
Show up at the claim
Anyone can sell a policy. We measure ourselves by the day it is tested.
A short history
- 1925
Established as Ed Nowgroski Insurance
NRG opens its doors in Seattle as Ed Nowgroski Insurance — founded by Ed Nowgroski, a celebrated University of Washington football player — and goes on to protect Pacific Northwest businesses for a century.
- 1973
Don Rupp, CPCU joins and buys the business
Don Rupp, CPCU joins Ed and purchases the agency. As they retired, other small agency owners asked him to merge with them, trusting that their clients would be well handled.
- 1994
Owner led & independent
Michelle Rupp, CPCU purchases the business from her father's estate — carrying on a family run, independent brokerage that answers to clients, not shareholders, ever since.
- Today
A program built for the trade
Tattoo Studio Insurance by NRG is NRG's specialist body art arm — covering tattoo, piercing and permanent makeup studios, with a risk advisor who speaks ink.
Risk advisors who know the work
A century in business · Trusted Choice independent agency · CPCU credentialed leadership