"It's just sitting here waiting for somebody to bring it to life. It needs that. Ashington needs that," Adam Nowell tells me.
We're sitting in what was once a 200-seat theatre in a building known locally as the Piv. The ashtrays haven't been emptied from their last use in the 90s, pint glasses sit on the tables that circle what was once a stage, and a TV the depth of about six flatscreens somehow sits suspended on a bracket above the stairs.
A theatre seems like an odd extra to be thrown with a tattoo studio, but Emporium do things a little bit differently. Before Adam and his wife Rebecca moved into the ground floor of the former bingo hall, they ran the UK's first mobile tattoo studio, operating from the back of an ambulance.
