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With tattooing, we're dealing with something
that I term a "lingua calda,"
tattooing is a hot language.
It's the cellular semiotics of communication
that we're only now beginning to realize exists
across the world and throughout history
in a way that no other medium functions.
♪
Almost all of my tattoos have a story, a meaning,
a reason for them that inspire me
and keep me going.
♪
I got involved with tattooing
because I guess I had a lot of things
seeping underneath my unconscious
and I wanted to give it expression.
♪
My tattoo is
a visualization of myself
that I gather energy from.
When I look at it, when I feel it,
whether physically or psychically,
it allows me to be my own person.
♪
♪ Well, we all come here to the tattoo convention ♪
♪ To show off our tattooed hides ♪
♪
♪ We are the tattooed world of the nations ♪
♪ One family, and tattoo is our bride ♪
♪ If you ever come with us to the tattoo convention ♪
♪ You'll see the world's oldest art ♪
♪ And it is a time of great celebration ♪
♪ And everyone here is a star ♪
♪ It is a time of great celebration ♪
♪ And everyone here is a star ♪
♪
I know initials give you--
Turn your chair around.
Sit sideways to me here, buddy.
Names or initials, if you're a married man,
-give you a fit. -Well, I had to put on...
I know it, but it's some girl's name, ain't it?
-Yeah. -And your wife don't like it,
is that what it is?
Well, not really, I just...
Here, put your hand straight through here, buddy.
There you go. Now you lean-- you lean right.
A little--a little further now.
All right, did somebody send you to me?
No, I'm just cruising up the avenue.
-You haven't heard of me? -No, sir.
Oh, raise your arm up.
Well, I'm known all over the world,
so have faith in me.
When I was a junior in college,
I was taking a folklore course
and needed to write a fieldwork paper.
♪
One night, I was wandering off-campus with a friend.
In the distance, I saw a sign that said,
"Tattooing by the teacher of the art since 1928.
As ancient as time, as modern as tomorrow."
♪
We got to the tattoo shop and I looked inside,
saw the silhouette of a man hunched over in a wheelchair,
electric eye flashing on and off,
a basset hound howling as I looked in the window,
and I felt like I was in a different world.
This was, for me, at that time,
like being in the middle of Franz Kafka novel.
♪
The next day, I went back to the tattoo shop
with my 35-millimeter camera.
So, I took a few snapshots outside the shop,
and the man inside yelled at me
to stop taking pictures, but he wanted me to come in.
I went inside and he scolded me
for not asking permission to make his picture.
I apologized.
I knew I was wrong.
He asked me to feel his muscle
on his arm and it was just bony.
And then he pulled a pistol out of his wheelchair
that was hidden and he put some bullets
on the table in front of him
and they were hollow-point bullets.
And he said, "Do you know what hollow-point bullets do
when they enter the body?
They shatter."
♪
And then he reared back and laughed, and said,
"I can really take care of myself.
I'm not afraid of anyone.
I've been doing this a long time, buddy."
Yeah, I was kind of shaking in my shoes,
and he started telling me his life story.
I kept coming back to the shop.
I went back every week for the next seven years.
-Who did that tattoo? -This is all me.
-The knee one. -A friend of mine.
When we was drinking a lot of beer.
We was young and putting tattoos on each other.
I tell you why I never like to ask a guy
who did his homemade job,
because sometimes that's done in some unfamiliar places.
Yeah, so you don't want to call the name
and you don't want to tell where you was at
when you had it put on so, therefore,
I don't embarrass him by asking him, you see?
'Cause a lot of that we call "chain gang tattooing."
Did in jail, a lot of it.
But you can do the same thing at home
or sitting in Sunday school.
♪
What makes a good tattoo?
A good tattoo is something the man studied
and thought it out long before he got it,
then he got it.
-Or as an artist? -As an art,
it's the shading, it's not the color.
You could put just a minimum amount of color
to real good shading and it'll go over,
it'll stand out.
You take the old-timey tattooing
that was did this way with heavy shading.
That's the way I was taught.
And I've seen these people grow older,
their tattoos still look better,
and they were put on over 50 years ago.
In the making of the movie, I wanted to bring
contemporary tattooing into the film.
Stoney was averse.
He felt there was a big generation gap
between the tattooing that he made
and younger tattoo artists who were starting
to come on to the scene.
Stoney described himself as being part of the old school.
And Stoney felt that most young tattoo artists
had no respect for this tradition.
So, I'd keep suggesting people that I read about
in little magazines and otherwise,
tattooing was still very much
kind of an underground art form at that point,
and came across an article about a man
by the name of Ed Hardy.
And I talked to Stoney about Ed Hardy,
and Stoney looked at me a little surprised
that I knew about him because I really was
just learning about tattooing.
And Stoney looked at me and he said,
"Ed Hardy is a prince."
And he saw Ed Hardy as being someone
of a younger generation
who really respected the old school
and was carrying forth with skills
that he didn't have.
And he agreed
to have Ed Hardy in the film.
You got a fantastic shop here, this is great.
Oh, this is ancient stuff.
I never was much of a hand to change anything.
Okay, so we'll build up a design
within this snake form that's already here.
This is like an infinity symbol
of the world coming back on itself.
I'm gonna do a water principle thing in here
since she's a water sign
and basically deal with kind of a yin-yang form
but not a rigid format within this oval shape here,
and make two opposing
kind of wave forces swirling around.
I'm sort of a sucker for recognizable imagery
that has a symbology behind it.
You know, I'm into tattoos and symbols too.
All mine are pretty much amulets that I'm wearing.
So, if we could do something to continue
with that kind of Oriental thing of...
Maybe seasonal flowers.
If I can do a few small cherry blossoms
and a few small maple leaves, and that would stand
for the turning seasons of the winter/fall season
and then the spring season, which are both--
Fall is a prelude to winter
and then the spring is a prelude to summer.
So, we'd get kind of a double layer
of meaning that way.
Is that all right?
I just always thought that flowers and trees
and things like that were somewhat typical tattoos.
-Not the way I tattoo. -No? Okay.
You've got to remember that a lot of images
that have become popular become kind of clichés,
there's a reason they got so popular
'cause they're so well-suited to being used as tattoos.
I'm kind of into tattoos being
you know, real one-of-a-kind sort of things.
I never had one yet that didn't hurt.
-Oh, don't say that. -But...
No, I'm not trying to flip you out or anything.
'Cause I'm really nervous.
I know, yeah, everybody is on these,
but all you got to do is, primarily,
if you can really relax,
I know that's easier said than done.
Okay, and I'll start out-- I'll start out real small,
okay, with just a little bit, all right?
When I got into tattooing professionally 26 years ago,
I made a conscious move to abandon the fine art
or high art world where I was a printmaker
and was showing my works
and never thought that it would really return to that,
but tattooing has gained credibility
within the fine art world.
♪
Ed Hardy, during the height of his career
as a tattoo artist,
was the most important practitioner
of that art form in the world.
He had a studio in San Francisco
located on Van Ness Avenue
in kind of an office building.
Didn't have a sign out front.
It was very nondescript.
Ed Hardy clients were people who were willing to spend
thousands and thousands of dollars on their tattoos
but who generally kept
a very private, low profile
in terms of the presence of their tattoos
within their normal work life.
They were bankers and lawyers and artists and others.
♪
The first thing I remember was Ed had
a tengu on the wall, over here it was.
And it was the first thing that I saw.
He had just opened a short time ago before that,
and it was the very first thing I saw
and it popped out of my head.
I went, "Oh, my God," I said, "We got to get this,"
you know, or something like this.
It's been growing ever since.
The legend of the tengu is all over.
Yeah, these things, I think, are so great,
these kind of mythical, part bird, part man.
Well, they mean a lot to me.
Their protection and their beauty,
and I like the Oriental art.
I always have liked that.
And to find such a talented man to do it
is even more of an honor.
♪
When you really realize that you are changing yourself,
that you're making some kind of statement
with the piece, you know, even if it's not--
not to be real serious or overly mental about it,
but I think a lot of people now,
the people that I'm dealing with
and that some of the rest of us,
you know, that are doing more kind of conscious
whatever you might want to call it, you know,
art tattooing or more thought-out stuff,
they think a lot about what they're going to get
and they're choosing something that as a piece
that will transform aspects of their life.
They're choosing it very-- tuning it down very finely,
you know, choosing it very carefully.
And when you're able to deal with an artist
who can visualize what you have in your mind,
whose primary reason for being there
is to interpret these things,
you get into a lot more sophisticated kind of imagery.
♪
[whirring]
♪
-Are you okay? -Oh, yeah.
I'm--I'm so surprised how little I feel it.
It's, uh, it's amazing.
The objective always was, I guess,
to get the most amount of pigment in
with the very least possible damage to the cells.
You know, before you started,
he told you that all tattoos hurt?
-Yeah. -They do.
There's no use in lying about it
or buttered you all up, buddy.
Get you all relaxed and then wham.
Don't get tattoos just for the hell of it,
just because somebody calls you chicken.
Maybe I was tattooing in my last life or something
and then--'cause I was aimed at it so early,
when I picked up on it as a kid, I was just...
You know, it just seemed so right for me
and I felt that that's what I should do with my life.
And, so, I was thinking if I do good enough
with it this time, then maybe we'll really be out
in the rocket phase next time around.
[whirring]
But I'm not really actively worried about that.
I'm just having fun now.
Tattooing is so great because it's the most immediate art
that there is,
and it's something that you have to get
all the enjoyment out of.
It forces you as a creative individual,
if you do it when you can practice it
in a creative kind of form.
You can't always, you know, depending on the person
and the circumstances,
but you have to do it--
It's going on immediately and there's no mistakes.
You know, hopefully you don't make any mistakes,
and you have to get everything out of it
while you're doing it, you can't--it can't be
like a favorite drawing that you leave around,
you know, and look at and decide
not to send off to the gallery or whatever
'cause it just goes away.
And it cuts through on a lot of the preciousness
and a lot of the bullshit that I find
in the straight art world, you know,
because with tattooing, you just enjoy it
for what it is, and the person has it,
then they leave, and it's just--it's just now.
It's like everything, it's just now.
♪
Ed Hardy had such respect for Stoney
that he wanted a tattoo from him.
♪
[whirring]
♪
You got a light touch, Stoney.
Nah.
♪
-Why'd you pick that one? -I don't know,
I've always liked cartoon rats, you know,
and it used to be a nickname of mine
when I was a kid at the beach and all that.
I just--I really liked the looks of that on the wall.
It's like any of them, you know, you just...
It seems like something that's necessary to have.
This is great.
Yeah, I know this is the high--high point
of my weekend here, I never--
never thought I'd get to go home
with something to show for the trip, you know?
[whirring]
I like Stoney's sense of humor about his work
and his ability to get...
You know, his drawings really got
a real, real good feeling to me,
and I wanted to get something that had a real--
a happy feeling to it, you know?
[whirring]
It's up there on the wall.
[whirring]
That's a Columbus rat.
They don't have them kind of rats
-in San Francisco. -Bring something back home
that's a little unusual, you know?
That rat is right there.
I sure like the way you blend colors in.
That's really, really...
I mean, I know you're the old-school style,
but it's rare that I've seen anybody--
I haven't really seen anybody work in the old-school style,
the tradition you came out of and using color and that,
the way that you've been doing it.
I think that'll do, that'll hold me
until the next one, won't it?
We got it solid on that, boss.
Yeah, that's not gonna go anywhere.
Les Blank, a filmmaker I'd long admired,
shot Stoney Knows How.
He really connected with Stoney.
In addition, he really liked Ed Hardy
'cause he had thought about getting tattoos.
♪
Before he left Columbus and before Ed left,
they got together in my backyard in Columbus.
Les got tattooed with two carnival masks.
♪
Les loved the tattoo he got from Ed Hardy.
He was very proud of it.
He showed it to everyone.
And Les had gotten to know Werner Herzog,
who saw his tattoo
and decided he wanted an Ed Hardy tattoo himself.
♪
At that time, Les was working on a film
called Burden of Dreams,
which was about the making of Werner's film Fitzcarraldo,
which was being shot in the Amazon jungle.
♪
Pacho Lane, who was one of my collaborators
on the making of the Stoney film,
was asked to be a translator.
We talked about him, if he had an opportunity,
filming an interview with Werner about his tattoo.
♪
Well, where are we?
We are in the jungle.
To specify it, this is Rio Camisea.
The camp that you see, I named
"película de muerte," "film of death."
We are doing a pretty crazy film here
named Fitzcarraldo.
♪
And what you see down here is Rio Camisea.
It's near the confluence of Rio Urubamba
in southern Peru,
on the eastern slope of the Andes.
So, you have to look on a map to find it.
The next civilization is about 600, 700 miles away from here.
♪
And I never thought of having any tattoo in my life
and then, finally, Les showed me his--
the man who operates the camera right now,
we can't see him because he's behind,
he showed me a very beautiful tattoo,
and the next week, I went to the same man.
I was in San Francisco.
His name is Ed Hardy, whom I found very strange
but very intriguing.
A good man. I liked him instantly.
He's quite weird, but a very great master,
probably the greatest master of his art.
And it is a real art.
♪
It has to do with ritual.
It is a very, very deep-rooted
kind of atavistic, archetypical
kind of self-expression, I think.
And our modern civilization
is one of the few civilizations,
of societies that does not know tattoos
as such a deep-rooted ritual.
♪
Whether you like tattoos or not,
your primitive ancestors were tattooed,
whether you be from the white race,
the yellow race, the red race, the brown race,
whatever race you came from,
everywhere the anthropologist has gone in this world,
he's found tattooing prevalent or it's been there and gone.
Your primitive ancestors were tattooed, like it or not.
♪
[whooshing]
♪
I was first a fire-eater, then a sword swallower.
Then I got tattooed, was the tattooed man.
And with what little bit of tattooing I have on me,
it was a lot of tattooing in the '50s.
It just blew people away.
And, nowadays, I look out into the audience
and there's people in the audience
who have much more tattooing on them than I have.
♪
The most dangerous part is eating fire,
not blowing the fireballs,
because your lungs are like an empty gas tank,
and if you should inhale while you have those fumes
near your mouth, the next time you put a torch there,
your lungs could literally explode inside of you.
[exploding]
♪
And you see when I put out a torch
and close my mouth around it,
I'm trapping the fumes inside the mouth,
so when I bring another lit torch here
and, boom, it explodes and I blow it
to the next torch before it does anything.
♪
[forceful exhalation]
We haven't left our primitive roots.
We belong to tribes.
And the circus/carnival people are my--
that's my tribe, my family.
That's who I relate to.
Outside of that,
the tattoo community is my tribe.
I don't understand the general public.
I do, but I don't understand their way of life.
When I was being tattooed, I wanted to get
a lot of tattooing done fast.
And never knew anything that long lines
are a son of a bitch, you know,
but I figured, you know, a spiderweb covers
a lot of territory, but I didn't realize
what I was in for and all this...
[mimicking whirring]
All these long lines,
you know, on the side here.
I'm an atheist, but when I had this done,
I saw Jesus in person.
If there are ten qualifications
to make you a tattoo artist, making money is number ten.
Number nine is being an artist.
And if you have no idea what the other eight are,
you don't belong in the business.
♪
♪ Have you ever noticed
when the other fellow doesn't think or act like us ♪
♪
♪ Some of the rest of us
won't even sit beside him on the bus ♪
♪
♪ We say that he's a little strange
and brand him with some hateful made-up name ♪
♪ Why can't we all be different
and still respect each other just the same ♪
♪ Oh, down through the ages,
the self-appointed righteous make the rules ♪
♪ All those in opposition
are said to be the evil heathen fools ♪
♪
♪ Tattooed people have been around
for many thousand years ♪
♪ And they've been murdered, scorned, and hated
by politicians and religions out of fear ♪
♪ In the South Pacific Islands
lived the Polynesian peoples long ago ♪
♪ Happy stories were told on their drums
as they danced to and fro ♪
♪ Their tattooed legs and bodies
bore the symbols of their honest ties with life ♪
♪ Every mark and every line told the truth
of their history and strife ♪
♪
♪ Out of the sea's horizon came the ships
of the earth's other end ♪
♪ With the foreign people who thought they had
life's answers for all men ♪
♪ They stepped upon the beaches
of the Polynesian people's sacred land ♪
♪ And in time they tried to kill them,
every woman, every child, and every man ♪
♪ Yes, these Christian missionaries
who forgot about the golden rule ♪
♪ Claimed any Polynesian with a tattoo was a fool ♪
♪ And not one theologian to this very day
wants to preach ♪
♪ How these tattooed people were slaughtered
in the name of the Prince of Peace ♪♪
♪
True story.
Well, normally, I wouldn't expose a tattoo so easily.
It also has to do with discretion a little bit,
but when you go swimming or so, it shows.
But I'll show it to you.
It's here.
Yeah, that's death laughing or singing
and, here, it's a microphone of the '30s,
and it's CDF, which is the second channel
of German television and they have been my partners
in several of my movie productions.
And I like it very much.
Do you think you might get another tattoo,
you know, on your other arm or some other part
of your body later on?
Yeah, I'm thinking about it, but I don't know.
I don't know yet what I should put there.
-You don't have an image yet? -Well, I have seen
a very beautiful design at Ed Hardy's place.
It was a coach of horses,
four or six horses pulling a coach
and they were rushing towards you
in almost three-dimensional,
and death was sitting and whipping the horses.
I like that very much.
Which one do you like better, Werner?
-Uh, my own. -Why?
Because it's more elaborate,
and all the ladies, for example, find it better.
I put it as a comparison here.
It's more elaborate somehow.
But that's a very, very beautiful one.
I like it, I must say.
Les's--Les's was very intriguing
because it's such a good idea,
death laughing and death crying.
Why would you want two death heads?
I mean, you say you want another one maybe.
That's always--that should be always included...
...on, uh, on a tattoo.
Every tattoo?
Well, you shouldn't have it...
You shouldn't have your body tattooed
without at least one death.
♪
I learned so much about tattooing from Ed Hardy.
And I was particularly interested
in this fine line black tattooing
that was being done in East L.A.
♪
I learned that this fine line black tattooing
had originated in prisons.
♪
It was a new style, a new approach to tattooing
which was beginning to take hold
in the tattoo world.
♪
And I did a series of photographs
that I later called the Hand of the Murderer.
These were men who had committed violent crimes,
but they were young.
They were between the ages of 19 and 21.
And their hands were, for me, almost effeminate.
And they had tattoos of seductive women
in this fine line style.
♪
Tattooing in prison was illegal,
and inmates,
particularly Mexican-American inmates,
were very ingenious in the way in which
they created tattoo machines.
They usually get electric motor of a cassette player,
like, for instance, that would be a good one.
Any radio or anything that has a cassette,
you could use and tear out, break it down
and make a tattoo machine of it,
and you use homemade things such as pens, you know,
for a tunnel for the needle.
Homemade needles coming in from the guitar strings.
[whirring]
♪
The prison tattoo machine does a certain type of tattooing
that you use what you have, and the end result
is a little bit different.
People are taking these tattoo machines
and are actually tattooing with them professionally.
There's certain tattoo artists that are making their living
using these prison tattoo machines
even though they have standard tattoo machines,
coil machines available.
[whirring]
♪
You'll see a lot of Hispanic people wear tattoos more
than any other kind of people, you know.
It's just like part of the culture, I guess,
and it runs in the families of [unintelligible].
♪
Well, they're done usually anytime,
but more or less, like, when...
Evenings, in the evenings, at night.
You know, you got to watch out for the man.
If he walks in, you're gonna lose all your equipment,
the machine, your ink, needles
and, also, on top of that, get a misconduct report.
♪
Uh, there's idle time and everything
and, you know, inside a penitentiary,
just like anywhere, I think it's only human
to get involved in doing some type of thing.
♪
I do some of the artwork myself.
I do a lot of tattooing and, to me,
I see it as a piece of art, as a work of art.
It's just a skin art, man.
You know, instead of putting it on paper,
you put it on your skin and show it, you know.
It's not for sale, you can't go and hang it on a wall
but, you know, everybody could see it.
And there's some that like it and some that disapprove,
but there's nothing wrong with them.
To me, there ain't.
In here, this is a whole different world, man.
You know, a person puts on a certain tattoo,
it's for a certain reason.
You've got to know what you're gonna put on
'cause it's gonna be there for the rest of your life.
♪
One of Ed Hardy's clients, Duke, was the owner
of Ten Thousand Waves, a chic hot tub resort,
a Japanese themed spa in Santa Fe.
A couple of ex-cons
from the New Mexico State Penitentiary
were now living on the outside on parole.
So, I asked Duke--
it was a wild idea--
"Can we film a scene with these men
showing their tattoos in a steaming hot tub
in the winter?"
And he said, "Sure."
♪
Most of them that I have were done in the joint.
It's, uh, just part of prison life.
You see, that's the whole idea of my back.
The back, I guess, was done
to symbolize my suffering.
Uh, getting busted,
and being in prison
was like the crucification.
And the bottom part,
this bottom part where the guy is finally
busting out of the bars and just taking off,
als--it symbolizes my freedom.
♪
And the tattoo on his chest of Jesus
ties the whole thing into the suffering.
And you'll notice that the bar is through his hand
and he's crucified with that.
♪
The more I study tattooing,
the more I realized that there were areas
in the history of this amazing art form
that were so totally misunderstood,
misrepresented,
subjected to intense cultural bias.
One area that attracted my interest
was early Christian tattooing.
♪
I found a book on Coptic tattoo
and was just in awe
of what was there.
♪
According to the author,
Coptic Christians had practiced tattooing
since the founding of the Coptic Church in 50 AD.
♪
It had images made from wood blocks
that were carved with these tattoo designs.
Copts made annual pilgrimages to the Holy Land
to be tattooed at Easter
with different stations of the cross.
♪
It was a sign, a symbol of devotion
carried on for centuries.
♪
These images reveal the deep history
of an area of Christianity that was little known,
so I began studying this further
and looked more deeply into why.
And through that, I discovered that much
of the Coptic tattooing tradition
dated back to references in the Old Testament
but also to the New Testament.
♪
Leviticus 19:28 states, "You shall not make
any cuttings in your flesh for the dead,
nor print any marks upon you."
In the New Testament,
the references to tattooing are more complex.
In Galatians 6:17, Paul says,
"Henceforth, let no man trouble me.
I bear on my body the marks of Jesus."
In looking more deeply into the etymology
of the word "mark" as it was translated
from the ancient Greek,
I realized that the word in Greek was "stigma."
"Stigma" literally means
"the permanent marking of the skin."
In Greece, it tends to be associated with the status
of being an outsider, being stigmatized.
Criminals were marked with stigma.
They were marked with tattoos, both in Greece and in Rome,
with little marks on their forehead.
Then there are the stigmata of Christ,
and then one thinks about the idea
of what Paul might've been saying,
which was that he bore on his body
the tattoos of Christ, the stigma.
[ethereal vocalizing]
♪
There are many anecdotal accounts
that during the Crusades,
there were people in the Holy Land
who had tattoos of crosses
on their wrist, on their hands,
so that they could be shown to the Crusaders
to prove that they were not infidels,
that they were Christians and should be spared.
♪
Now, what about the one on your hand?
-That little cross. -This little cross?
Guys in la barrio where I grew up
were all putting crosses here on their hand,
and we were in this gang called The Project Roamers.
Yeah.
I think I put this on when I was 13 or something.
-What's that right below it? -Here?
It was an S for an old girlfriend that I used to have.
Shirley.
Have you ever felt like you wanted
to get any of them removed
or do you feel happy with what you got?
Yeah, I feel real happy.
I'm looking forward to putting some more on
and just tying it all together
so it doesn't look so spaced out.
And this way everything will just be one tattoo.
Was there a book or something you could choose these from?
How did you know which ones that you wanted?
Well, these I had designed myself.
I gave someone the idea.
I told them, "This is what I want,"
and we sat down and looked at different cars,
and from there we put the patterns together
that I wanted.
Are you a lowrider yourself?
I used to be, yeah.
I've had a few, not anymore.
-In L.A.? -Yeah, in Cali, yeah,
California, where I grew up.
What're you doing here?
I go to the College of Santa Fe.
I'm a student there, Criminal Justice student.
Having thought about reasons why people get tattoos,
and the way they get tattoos,
I started to put together a philosophy about it.
The Japanese basic approved way of tattoo
is that they contract with an artist
and he does their whole body,
neck to ankles.
American tattoo has traditionally, I think,
been a real scattershot individualistic
type of approach where people
just get the tattoo as their mood strikes them.
So, what I've tried to do with my tattoo
is sort of combine the two philosophies
and have a general overall plan
where the tattoo is always complete in itself,
but it has always got more work to do on it.
I was attracted to the tattoo field
because of what I'd seen done in Japanese tattooing,
which is probably the singular place in the world
that it had been developed
as a very complex aesthetic unto itself.
The Japanese aesthetic in tattooing
builds on the imagery
of the ukiyo-e woodcut prints
of the 19th century.
They feature scenes of what was thought of
to be the floating world.
♪
The man singularly responsible for the birth
of modern tattooing was Sailor Jerry Collins,
a Honolulu based tattoo artist who died in 1973.
He was a traditional American artist,
a fantastic strong stylist within the American tradition
who began to really explore Asian art,
and specifically the Japanese tattoo tradition
in the early 1960s.
♪
Ed Hardy corresponded with Sailor Jerry,
worked with Sailor Jerry,
and he brought that aesthetic further.
At the height of his career,
Ed made annual trips to Tokyo to tattoo.
He was very interested in the Japanese aesthetic
of the body suit, of the unified tattoo,
reflective of the unified thinking
of the person wearing the tattoo.
And I hoped to fuse that in and create something similar
to that in a Western context
using our unique American experience.
And it has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams
in terms of the interest level
and the ability and enthusiasm of the people
entering the field both as tattoo artists
and what the tattoo clients,
the tattooees are bringing to it
as they see the possibilities extended.
♪
Beyond the visible meaning of a tattoo or subject matter,
the formal compositional abstract qualities
were always of paramount importance to me.
And this was true especially in the Asian work,
the Japanese work that was my primary initial influence,
and these began to be more and more important
I think in the late '70s and into the early '80s
as purely abstract tattoo patterns begin to be used.
But in terms of minimalist or abstract tattoo work,
some of the first works in that field
that were really the most beautifully done
and profoundly thought out and executed
were by a woman named Jamie Summers
who tattooed under the name of La Palma.
♪
Beginning in the late 1970s, she and I were associated
and she learned to tattoo basically in my studio.
She was an installation artist and a sculptor,
and she was interested in making tattoos
that redefined the affecting presence
of the human body.
Her tattoos were sculptural.
They were often abstract or organic forms and shapes.
She saw the person who got her tattoos
as a living sculpture.
She was a strong believer in tattooing
as a therapeutic art form in a sense.
She felt that individuals could use the tattoo
to help discover their inner psyche.
It could drive them to deeper intuitive thinking,
greater and more profound appreciation of themselves
and their relationship to art, culture,
society, their place in the world.
Jamie's really into what she refers to
as biographical tattoos
and tattoos about as closely linked to nature
as one can get.
I said, "Jamie, I want some wings,
but I don't the typical tattoo wings
with the fire and all the color."
So what she did was photograph
some of her geese's wings,
and brought it in
and showed me three different types
and I picked out what I liked.
And just by trade I happen to be a messenger,
but there's no Hermes implications there.
I am kind of light on my feet.
I am kind of light on my feet, and, well,
the first day after I had these wings put on
I bowled a 215, so.
[laughing]
Here they are.
This is the ribbing.
It's a two-dimensional wing.
This is the inside of the wing
and this is the feathered effect on the outside of the wing.
So, if you look at them like this
you can sort of almost feel the flow of 'em.
Yeah, I really like 'em.
In the course of her work, she influenced
a great many of us with her concepts
and the pieces that she was able to complete.
She tragically died a very young death.
♪
Jamie was really advancing in the art world
when she tragically was killed.
She had a studio in SoHo.
She was on her bicycle,
and a garbage truck ran up over the curb
and she died.
♪
And Jamie's ideas and execution
and method of working influenced a lot of us.
She particularly did some work
on an artist named Cynthia Witkin
who's centered in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Did a large piece on Cynthia's back
and inspired Cynthia to take the tack
that she has developed into with her own tattoo work.
I had been to previous tattoo parlors
and I'd been looking for somebody to do something
very different looking,
and there wasn't a great deal
of black work being done at the time,
and so when I met with Jamie she was very excited.
We had a very good connection.
We talked about the tattoo,
and I came back the next day
and she did 11 hours of work on me.
And that was the only time I saw her.
We kept really close correspondence.
We talked on the telephone,
and she was a great mentor for me
to make the transition from
my initial long life dream of being a doctor
to my new ambition of being an artist.
♪
And Cynthia's probably working
to the greatest extent of any of the younger tattoo artists
with this minimal, very intense abstracted imagery
that comes from--drawing from a spiritual tradition
that is very much her own, that's centered
on the New Mexico landscape,
that's centered on her experiences
and sensibilities as a working artist.
♪
The idea of the white tattoo
that would blush pink when a person was hot,
the idea of the conceptual tattoo,
geometric forms,
art forms that related to other art forms
to make connections.
♪
She's drawing from a lot of these deep springs
of artistic inspiration and bringing
a really unique sensibility to her tattoos.
♪
Cynthia, at that time, was married
to the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin
and was very much involved in helping
to style his photographs.
♪
Cynthia is in Albuquerque
and has done her best
to carry forth tattooing
as Jamie Summers helped to redefine it.
♪
Tattoos mean a lot of things to different people.
Mine mean to me the essence of life,
freedom, my religious background.
I was never really a Catholic.
I was very non-denominational.
I believed in God, but I didn't know His son,
but my tattoos,
they speak for themselves.
I got 'em in prison.
It was a homemade tattoo gun
and homemade ink.
We used shampoo
and other stuff to do it with.
It took a grand total
of 18 hours to make the ink
and it took two days to do the tattoos.
This would happen when a guard was up at the front
and we would use another inmate
to get his attention
or the officer knew what we were doing and didn't care.
I put that tattoo in there because that eagle,
he's free, but that doesn't mean
that he always gets to eat
because he's the king of the sky.
The one I have on here dove into the water
and came out with nothing,
and it's the same with me.
I came out of prison with nothing.
I dove into this world and came up empty-handed.
Death disguised, looking around the corner
like a person out there on the street.
He doesn't know when his next meal's coming from.
He doesn't know where he'll be
within the next hour or so or the next--
if he'll wake up in the morning.
♪
Who's that on the right arm there?
That's Walt Whitman.
It's a portrait of Walt Whitman, 1887,
and he called it The Laughing Philosopher,
although other people have called it
the Santa Claus Whitman.
Tattoo was done right here by Bob Roberts.
It's a very personal tattoo.
Been reading Whitman for many years
and it's just one way I identify a little bit closer with him.
What's your favorite poem by Whitman?
Probably Song of the Open Road.
Can you recite part of it?
No, I can't, I'm not that well-versed.
Pardon the pun.
[laughing]
This arm is my Oriental arm,
and that's the way I wanted it
'cause I've always had a pretty deep fascination
with Oriental symbols and images
and landscapes and stuff.
Good deal of it was done by Bob Roberts
and I was lucky enough to have Ed Hardy finish it off.
Originally just had a tiger here,
and then I realized when I stepped over the line
and I wanted continuity, I wanted theme,
I didn't wanna just have a piece here,
a piece there, a piece there.
I wanted the thing to be drawn in,
to have some kind of a theme, you know?
So, I just had a tiger there and Bob--
I came back and said, "Bob, fill it up."
He said, "I knew you were gonna do that to me."
♪
I was always fascinated by tattoos
but I wasn't gonna go in and just,
you know, just get one and, you know,
I didn't find the work that I'd seen
or the shops very attractive at all
until I'd seen the work of Ed Hardy
and seen there was a whole different world
that was just starting.
This was from a Walter Crane illustration,
another turn of the century British illustrator.
Basically the idea behind it is sort of surrealistic
tiger lilies turning into tigers.
The mouths of the tigers are a part of the flower,
and the woman in a little tiger robe coming out of there.
But this was also planned one whole idea.
You know, my chest piece.
This rather peaceful scene goes into this,
you know, not so peaceful.
It's just busting out.
I really like that whole concept of that piece,
both because of the transformative nature of it.
I think that lends itself real well to tattoo imagery
since tattooing is a transformative process.
The work of Ed Hardy really inspired me
and him as a person, he really inspired me,
and I was lucky enough to get offered an apprenticeship
with another tattooer who was a friend of his,
Dean Dennis,
and it was a very special thing,
because there were very few women tattooing.
So, it was kind of a--
I was in the right place at the right time.
♪
We used to talk about what our tattoos meant to us
and how you just-- some of 'em you'd had so long
you don't even look at 'em anymore,
but really what they are is a--
they are a part of you.
I used to say, "Your brains spilled out on your skin
and now you're wearing it,"
and that's why I'm comfortable with the work that I have,
because I thought a lot about every one I got
and they're my friends, just like my books are.
♪
Tattoos are--just the way they say you are what you eat,
you are what you wear, too.
♪
Since the 19th century,
tattoo artists have done drawings and paintings
to show the public what images
were available for tattoos.
These drawings and paintings became known as flash
for their immediate appeal.
They were colorful,
they illustrated the thinking of tattoo artists.
In some cases, tattoo artists made stencils
from these drawings and paintings
and then used the stencil as an outline
to follow when making a tattoo.
♪
In other cases, tattoo artists
only used these as an inspiration,
as a way of showing their public what they could do.
And then when they made the tattoos
they were done free-hand.
In the early 1990s,
Ed Hardy and I began talking about the need
to exhibit these drawings and paintings
that had been made for more than a century
by tattoo artists.
We organized a show called Flash from the Past
that was at the Hertzberg Museum in San Antonio.
This became the basis of a much larger
and more important show
at the Drawing Center in New York
called Pierced Hearts and True Love.
♪
In the process of curating and organizing,
Ed Hardy and Chuck Eldridge came to Arlington, Texas
for a tattoo convention.
There they met a woman by the name
of Lotteva Wagner-Davis.
Lotteva was the daughter of Gus Wagner
who billed himself as a world champion tattooist,
globetrotter, last of the hand tattooists.
Just prior to the Hertzberg exhibition,
Lotteva died.
I went to West Texas and I met with her heir,
Rocky Reisner.
Rocky was very nervous about what to do with this collection.
It quickly became apparent to me
that this was the oldest
American tattoo collection ever found.
♪
Gus Wagner's tattoo flash amazed me.
He was a figure out of the novels of Herman Melville.
He was a merchant seaman who learned to tattoo
in Java and Borneo.
He made his own tattoo instruments
hand-carved out of wood and ivory.
His tattoo flash was contained in little books
that he carried with him.
Hand-painted designs on canvas pages
that showed the iconography of the popular culture,
the folk culture of the 19th century.
This was the root of this tradition in American tattooing
as it had not been known before.
♪
My wife, Kaleta Doolin, and I acquired this collection,
not for the purposes of keeping it,
but as a means to bring it into the world.
I promised Rocky that the work would never be sold,
and ultimately, we donated this collection
to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York.
♪
When I was interviewing Stoney
I marveled at the series of photographs
that were stapled on the wall
on the perimeter of the interior of his shop.
♪
What I learned was that these photographs,
these snapshots, were sold by Bernard Kobel
in Florida in a catalog.
♪
In the 1950s and '60s,
there were not a lot of photographs available
of tattooed people.
Bernard Kobel, who was a collector of photographs
of heavily tattooed men and women,
developed a catalog through which he sold snapshots
that were sent to him by tattoo collectors,
people who had tattoos,
people who were married to people with tattoos.
Looking at these photographs today,
one can only wonder who these people are.
♪
They were people who were proud of their tattoos,
but could only show them in black and white photography.
These were photographs that apparently
people traded among themselves.
They very much anticipated the explosion
of tattoo magazines today
where there are thousands of images
of tattooed people.
The photography is better,
they're in color,
but the spirit of them,
the mystery of them remains.
♪
[waves crashing]
The seeds of the tattoo uprising were sown in the 1760s...
♪
...when French and British explorers discovered
in Polynesia and the cultures of the South Sea Islands
tattooing on a scale never seen before
in the Western world.
♪
The British Captain James Cook
is credited with introducing the word "tattoo"
into the English language.
Prior to the voyages of Captain Cook,
the word "tattoo" meant a drum rhythm.
Cook, upon hearing the word "tatau,"
which was a Polynesian word that he found
in the Marquesas Islands,
coined the word "tattoo"
to describe this practice of permanently marking the skin.
♪
On his expedition, Cook brought the naturalist
Sydney Parkinson with him.
Parkinson did drawings
of plant life and vegetation,
but also did drawings of some of the heavily tattooed people
that he encountered with Cook.
♪
In 1769, Captain James Cook
met a heavily tattooed man
who was called Omai in Tahiti.
In 1773, Cook brought Omai to England
and introduced him to British society.
People who had never seen tattooing
of this magnitude were introduced to the art form
in a way that, for them,
was likely strange and exotic.
Prior to this time,
tattooed people were seen as savages.
But in the portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
we see a man of great dignity.
♪
Tattooing, for me, is a--
it's not just the art, it's the liberty
to be able to do as you feel, to be your own boss.
More importantly, it's the clients
and it's the stories that each of those clients
brings to the table.
Every day it's a new client, a new story,
and it's a new adventure.
♪
I first started coming to Paris about 15 years ago.
♪
And I fell in love with the architecture,
the art, and I started coming back and forth
from California,
and I got lucky and met my wonderful wife.
♪
I think that the younger generation has less fear
about expressing themselves.
Also their image is very important to them.
You can look at the,
in French we say "le réseaux sociaux,"
the Instagram, Facebook.
Nowadays, when I do a tattoo, when I finish the tattoo,
not only do I take a picture for myself,
I take the photograph with the client's phone
so that they're able to use that.
And a lot of the time they're more interested
in looking at it on their phone
than they are looking at it on their own body.
♪
I manage Handmade Fine Tattoo Studio.
I do the social network for them.
I also work with tattoo artists when they need me to,
and I'm journalist for [unintelligible]
which is a media about tattoo artists.
I chose the name Stigma because of a famous sociologist
who made a book named Stigmata
about every stigma that can you have, like tattoo,
and you choose them.
♪
I like to work with found objects.
I go to the flea market.
I like to find old brass fixtures
and I take those and I recreate them into a tattoo machine.
♪
Yes, it is a tool,
but we can also take this tool
and turn it into an art object.
It has to work.
If it doesn't work anymore
it's just a beautiful paperweight.
But I do believe that it's something
that can be beautiful as well as functional.
♪
In the early 1990s, my wife, Kaleta Doolin,
an artist and feminist arts advocate,
became interested in utilizing tattoo imagery
in her sculpture.
When Ed Hardy saw these new pieces that Kaleta was making
he invited her to become part of an exhibition
that he was curating in Chicago
called Eye Tattooed America,
which involved artists from around the country
who were incorporating tattoo imagery in new forms.
♪
By the early 1970s, the momentum for the recognition
of tattooing as an art form
was beginning to build.
Lyle Tuttle emerged as the first pop star tattoo artist,
appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1970.
In 1979, Chuck Eldridge
started the Tattoo Archive in Berkeley.
In 1981, Marcia Tucker published a groundbreaking article
on tattooing for Artforum Magazine
in which she talked about tattooing and its relationship
to new directions in contemporary art.
Also in 1981, MTV launched
as a television channel.
For the first time, the general public
was able to see tattoos on rock stars, musicians,
and other icons of popular culture as never before.
In 1982, two important publications
on tattooing appeared.
One was Lyle Tuttle's Tattoo Historian
and the other was Ed Hardy's Tattootime.
♪
All of this builds to Tattoo Expo '82,
spearheaded by Ed Hardy
on the ocean liner the Queen Mary
docked at Long Beach, California.
♪
This was the most amazing gathering of tattooed people
and tattoo artists ever assembled.
Tattoo artists came from around the world.
It occurred in this amazing setting.
There were seminars, there were workshops,
there were film screenings on the lower deck
of the Queen Mary.
People were proud of their tattoos.
People were comparing the images that they had on their bodies.
They were competing with each other,
driving each other forward.
There was a whole energy
that was beginning to manifest itself.
It was a community of people
dedicated to a shared mission and vision.
Tattooing was emerging as a global phenomenon.
♪
Ed Hardy, in my opinion,
helps to bridge the gap between generations.
You have the older generation, which was a--
I would say that tattooing at that time
was more of a craft, and Ed Hardy,
because of his background, was able to bring in
actual art into tattooing.
♪
Ed Hardy, for us, the younger generation,
he's a mythical figure in a sense.
He's able to take many different styles of art,
mix them together, and come up with something
that's entirely new.
As a tattoo artist, he was always ahead
of what was happening next,
and he continues to own a tattoo shop
in San Francisco.
He isn't tattooing himself.
He's now devoting himself to painting
and printmaking and other artwork.
He's done ceramics.
♪
When I started studying tattooing
I could never have imagined what it was going to become today.
How tattooing went from being one of the most forbidden
art forms in the Western world
to one of the most common.
Tattoos are everywhere.
We see them in the fine arts.
We see them in folk culture
and in popular culture.
We see them in advertising, television, and movies.
♪
And most importantly, we see the history of tattooing
being explored and represented
in gallery and museum exhibitions
in the United States and around the world.
♪
I think that tattooing is going to continue to evolve
and surprise us in many ways.
Things that we wouldn't even think of today
will end up being done.
Because of computers,
because of all the tools we have at hand
I think it's gonna go in a lot of different directions.
♪
I mean, the tattooing today, you know,
it's ahead of everybody probably around here.
Old timers and new people in the business alike,
we've all seen, you know, these changes come down
and there's more happening now.
A lot of what's happening maybe won't last.
Maybe a lot of it's kind of a flash in the pan
with techniques and designs and that,
but at least it's something new, there's some new blood in it.
I think there's more kinds of people
interested in tattooing now
than there ever were before, and I think that's good.
The more of 'em we can get out and the people that see,
I mean, things like this movie and magazine articles and that,
anything that's showing it in a positive light
and presenting us as people that are doing a craft
and not just showing it off as something completely
off the wall, well, people read that and they say,
"Well, I always have thought about getting a tattoo
and maybe it's all right now to do it."
They see that people are working cleaner
and there's more colors and that there's--
you know, it just gets it out in the open more.
So, I think the renaissance is on.
I think there's more exciting tattooing being done now
than there ever was in the history of the world.
You know, it's really-- it's just exploding.
♪