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I think the real breakthrough in the late sixties and early seventies began with Sailor Jerry. He was the Cezanne of modern tattooing. He was greatly influenced by Japanese and Asian art, and he was actually more partial to Chinese culture than Japanese. He tried to integrate that real exotic stuff with contemporary western styles and with a greater range of pigment, and in this way he expanded the repertoire of images he used for tattoo designs.

That's what got me started. I got into tattooing because Phil Sparrow showed me a book of photographs of Japanese tattooing. So I think that the Japanese example was really responsible for what Arnold Rubin used to call "the tattoo renaissance," when Cliff Raven and Don Nolan and Mike Malone and I got into it. After I got the introduction to Kazuo Oguri through Sailor Jerry and went to Japan in l973 with the fantasy that I would stay over there for several years and develop my tattooing and fit right into the culture.

But I found out that my fantasy and reality were quite different. After less than six months I came back to the states and soon after that I opened Realistic Studio in San Francisco. As far as I know it was the first studio in which a tattoo artist worked by appointment only and with the mandate that all work would be one-of-a-kind original designs developed in collaboration with the client instead of offering a set image bank into which the customer had to fit his or her psyche. And immediately I began getting a lot of other tattoo artists as clients because the tattoo community was still quite small then and the grapevine was pretty rapid and a lot of people had heard that I was in Japan and they were curious to see what I had gleaned from over there.

I already had a reputation before I left for doing big Japanese style work because I had been doing some of that in the San Diego shop in the late sixties and early seventies. So I started getting all these tattoo artists in and tattooing them and they would see the environment I was working in, which was a funky little office in the back of an office building. It was the complete opposite of the conventional high profile shop covered with neon signs in the middle of the honky-tonk district. It was attracting people through word of mouth who wanted to be there and who were curious about it and had some previous knowledge of and interest in tattooing.

One of my first clients for large piece was the London tattooist Dennis Cockell. He was originally going to go to Japan to get tattooed by me and missed out because I had left there, and he tracked me down in San Francisco and got this whole torso tattoo. After that I began getting people who were very serious about it and wanted epic work, and also a lot people wanting just very strange one-of-a-kind designs. So as the word got around that there was a studio where you could get a unique tattoo in a private environment, and it began to kind of catch on, and it escalated through a widespread adaptation of the Japanese look with tattoo artists, at first primarily in America and then some in Canada such as Dave Shore were interested in it, and then it began to spread to Europe. Cockell was pushing that Japanese look in his shop in London, and then there was George Bone who was an established London tattooist and was doing Asian style work.

The first tattoo convention was held in January of l976 in Houston, Texas. Dave Yurkew, who was tattooing at that time in Houston, organized it and it turned out to be kind of a momentous event, because it was the first time there had ever been so many tattooers under one roof. The standard joke was that if you got all these tattooers in one room and then turned the lights out five minutes later you'd turn it on and see how many dead there were, because people seemed to be so at odds with each other in the business. But in fact, when they got together, both the artists and the fans realized that they had a lot in common and a lot of old grievances and mistrusts were washed away and people began sharing ideas. So I think the idea of organizing events where people can gather on neutral ground was tremendously important.

The National Tattoo Association had been formed right around that time by Crazy Eddie Funk and Terry Wrigley and a whole crew of old guard tattooers. There had been some tattoo clubs before. Les Skuse had the Bristol Tattoo Club, and there used to be a club based in New York that was called the Tattoo Club of the United States in the sixties, and there had been some other small clubs. As a historic note, Chuck Eldridge turned up a newspaper article about a tattoo convention held somewhere in the south in Atlanta or Augusta, Georgia, in the 1880's. So this notion had been around but when the National Club held its first convention in Reno in 1977 it was really heavily attended. There was a great deal of interest and a lot of activity in tattooing.

A lot of Europeans turned up and at that convention. I met Good Time Charlie Cartwright and Jack Rudy, who were doing monochromatic single-needle photo-realist style tattooing with an image base that came from traditional Latino street culture and mimicked the kind of tattooing that's usually associated with jailhouse stuff. It had this very fine pointillist kind of look. There were portraits of loved ones and a lot of themes were street-related, with a very dark kind of beautiful Spanish feel to it. Mike Malone and Bob Roberts and I were all completely knocked out by it. This was the first kind of counterpoint to the Japanese tradition as another way to tattoo. We were very taken with the whole idea of the single needle style and all rushed to learn and to develop that.

There had of course been historic precedents. The earliest Japanese masters had done single-needle work by hand, and probably most of the earliest machine tattooing was single-needle outline. Certainly George Burchett and his British contemporaries all did single-needle work. At the most he may have used three-needle outlines. So this was a look that had been around probably 70 or 80 years earlier, but had not been much in use since.

In January 1977 I went so far as to open a new tattoo shop in the Mission District of San Francisco, the original Tattoo City. Bob Roberts, who had been working with Cliff Raven, came up to work at Realistic with me, and I opened Tattoo City and we broke in Chuck Eldridge and Jamie Summers to tattoo there, and positioned it specifically as a street shop that would be in a mainstream heavily Latino part of town. My theory was that we would get to do a lot of that imagery if we were around the right kind of people who wanted it. I eventually bought Good Time Charlie's shop in east Lost Angeles. He and Jack Rudy had been running that shop but Charlie had a religious vision and decided he was going to get out of tattooing, and I bought the shop really to keep it going as a base of expression for that kind of work. I thought it was an incredible and really creative thing that was happening with it. So Jack managed that shop for me. We eventually had to move the location to a block down the street and we called it "Tattooland".

So it was all word-of-mouth among tattooers, because people were more in touch with each other by then. They traded business cards; they got on the phone; they began flying around the visiting each other, and as a result a large part of my clientele consisted of other tattoo artists who had come from all parts of the US and even Australia and Europe, and then they would take these new ideas back to their respective areas. The number of tattoo artists was also increasing at that time. So into the very late seventies there was a pretty even mixture of explorations of this kind of fantasy art subject matter done with single-needle. A lot of it was based on science fiction illustrations by people like Virgil Finlay, a famous illustrator of science fantasy stories in the l940's. I actually discovered a book of Finlay's illustrations and brought it in to show it to Jack Rudy and that opened a whole new door.

Mike Malone also had a great impact on disseminating awareness of modern tattooing by going over to Europe. He and Candy Everett began living together in the late 70's and she inspired Malone to travel and they went to Europe where conditions then were really abysmal and behind the times. They met a lot of young German and Danish tattooers and got them hip to what was gong on in the US. So there was all this cross-fertilization of ideas. At the same time Cliff Raven had left Chicago and moved out to tattoo in Hollywood.

So by the late seventies the old main stream western tattoo tradition of hearts and anchors and stuff like that was only surviving at a low voltage in the shops that had determined to remain traditional, most of which were on the Eastern seaboard.

Also about that time more and more people started getting into tattooing, and of course as the case has always been there were a lot of fans who began putting on tattoos after they get a whole bunch of them, and they would go into business. Equipment was easier to obtain. Of course, tattoo supplies had always been available. The old time tattooers at the turn of the century would have on their business cards "supplier to the trade". Percy Waters and those guys would all sell machines and pigments, and then Wagner in New York City sold tons of stuff. Of course the official line was that they only sold it to other professionals, but in fact they sold it to anyone. I think most people who took it up seriously got into tattooing simply by becoming pests and wearing down the resistance of an established tattooer. That's how I got into it.

But information got disseminated faster as people got together at these conventions. Just the speed of modern communication had a lot to do with it. It was easier to get good cameras and take good photos of the tattoos that were to be seen at conventions. And by the early eighties the conventions had become a regular thing. There was one big convention each year in different cities and they became more and more heavily attended. But I and some others became kind of disillusioned. We wanted the convention to be more than just a chance to get together and get really whacked out and take as many drugs and drink as much as you could with friends that you only saw once a year. We thought we should have conventions where we focused on really informing people about tattooing.

In 1982 I was thinking of trying to produce a book on contemporary tattooing, and was trying to figure out how to get an agent in New York to front the book. So in my quest for an agent I met Ernie Carafa, who was a tattoo artist in New Jersey. In 1982 Carafa said he would finance a tattoo publication or magazine. I think that he wanted it to be a springboard for his supply business, which was not my intention at all. He said I could do whatever I wanted in the magazine, and we also cooked up the idea to do a tattoo convention that would do something very different from what people had seen up to that time. He and I and a San Francisco silk screen printer, Ed Nolte, a tattoo fan with whom I had done a lot of T-shirt design, collaborated to put together this tattoo show in the Lost Angeles area.

I organized the whole liaison, and by chance the Queen Mary was one of the possible convention sites, and I thought that would be the best place for the convention because of the whole seafaring tradition of tattooing. So we arranged for a convention on the Queen Mary and in the fall of 1982 we held a convention that we called "Tattoo Expo '82". It was a very information-intensive show. We had a many videos and films as we could, and talks, and I presented a whole series of slide shows. It was huge success.

A contingent from Japan came over. I had written to every Japanese artist that I knew. Kazuo Oguri was supposed to come over but he couldn't make it. But a Japanese publisher who at that time was publishing a big book on Horiyoshi II (Mr. Kuronuma) did come over from Tokyo and put up a photo display of tattoos by Horiyoshi II and also brought one of Horiyoshi's clients who had a full-body tattoo.

About the same time we launched the first issue of "Tattootime", called "New Tribalism", which Leo Zulueta and I pasted up together. I wrote most of the thing. We got contributions from other people, and we got all this rolling. "Tattootime" started out a little slow, but it had an immediate effect on the tattoo artists who did see it. Leo Zulueta was a friend of mine from San Francisco who was involved in the Punk Rock scene and was doing posters for punk bands. In other words, things that he would do on his own and just paste up around town using really confrontational imagery from S&M books and all that kind of stuff. Leo had me tattoo him with this black pattern tattooing. I hadn't ever done anything remotely like that. I had done a little bit of abstract work, but nothing like this really bold black stuff which was based on Pacific island cultures. He had me do both his arms around 1979. I was encouraging him to get into tattooing himself.

So for the cover of the first "Tattootime" we used a photo a leg tattoo which was inspired by Samoan designs but with a big Japanese serpent intertwined, and Leo and I made up the name "Tribalism" for this style. It had an immediate impact. I believe that convention on the Queen Mary was in October of 1982 and in the spring of 1983 I went to a National Convention in Arizona and tattoo artists started coming up to me and saying "check out this tribalism I've been doing on my girl friend," and at that moment I realized the power of the press and the influence you could have by getting these images out in a more widely distributed format. As of that moment black graphic tattooing took off. The only precedent that I know of outside of pre-technological societies was work that Cliff Raven had been doing in Chicago. Actually Cliff had always been very interested in Marquesan work and had been doing work of that kind on a guy that owned an influential fashion store called "Hot Flash" in San Francisco.

The other one who took an interest in it was Mike Malone who in 1978 I believe drew up a sheet of traditional Hawaiian patterns, or his perception of traditional Hawaiian tattooing and tried to rekindle an interest in a design form which had completely died out among native Hawaiians. And gradually he got people of Hawaiian descent who lived in the area to rediscover their heritage and they began getting black graphic work. This was in the late seventies.

So after we featured tribalism in the first "Tattootime" it took off and became the buzzword for the 80's. They took everything from Celtic knot work to Pacific Island designs and Northwest Coast Haida designs. I think tattooing is the great art of piracy. In fine art it's fashionable to talk about "appropriation" in the post-modern visual arts and architecture of the 1980's. It's certainly always been going on in tattooing because it's a totally bastardized art. Tattoo artists have always taken images from anything available that customers might want to have tattooed on them. The customer might ask for a design from a church pew or an acid rock album cover or the tattooer might choose a black panther design out of a 1934 kid's book and adapt it to make a tattoo design. But I think tribal tattoo designs continue to be a pretty even balance of literal transcriptions of images that some anthropologist recorded in a study of a pre-industrial culture and then tattoo artists started doing spin-offs of that.

The tribal style was good because it liberated tattooing from being totally content-oriented. There's even a weird sort of snobbery among people who get black pattern tattooing. Some of them take the attitude that their tattoos are somehow more refined or pure because they are not pictures of something and they don't tell a story. When in fact, I think it 's just a particular style.

When I was tattooing in San Diego in the sixties, I had old sailor Jerry flash on the wall. Sailors would come in and they'd laugh at the Betty Boop design, and then they'd get a Road Runner tattoo. I think the black tribal stuff is going to be exactly the same. Thirty years from now there will be all these old farts kicking around with their tribal tattoos and some twenty-year-old will say "haw haw you must have got that in the 80's." Someday it will be dated just as any style becomes dated. It's going to continue to be part of the mix, because it's just like making more flavors available. But it really added to the visual interest of what was available, and as a counterpoint to this whole explosion of color tattooing. And a lot of people did really amazing work, getting beautiful results by incorporating untattooed areas of skin as part of the design instead of going for that blanket coverage look. So much of the Japanese work had been done poorly had just ended up in a big mess that you couldn't read too well.

In 1983 I had made connection with Mr.. Kuronuma, whom I consider the greatest living tattoo artist in the world. He was someone whom I knew about through very scant photos of his work. He was one of those legendary tattooers who was supposed to be, and was, very very difficult to get through to and to see. But I got an introduction through his publisher, and Kuronuma agreed to put a big tattoo on me.

So I went back to Japan in 1983, after an absence of ten years, and it was a very strange seminal kind of trip for me because I not only went to Japan, but I brought my tattoo gear with me at the urging of a friend of mine from San Francisco. He is very interested in Rockabilly culture and the whole fifties thing: the Elvis phenomenon. He was tending bar at this trendy place in Tokyo. All the people around there were totally into that Rockabilly scene and were worshipping their conceptions of James Dean and Elvis and what the American fifties stood for with the Cadillacs with their big tail fins and all that.

He said, "All these Rockabilly kids want tattoos," but I didn't believe him because I knew how transgressive tattooing was in Japan. But I brought my gear over anyway and as it turned out I did tattoo a lot of people in Japan who wanted totally retro 40's and 50's Americana imagery, which I had not been doing at all. That stuff was not cool to get in the West at that point. And I also made a side trip down to Guam and Palau. In Palau I tattooed a lot of natives with again very 40's Americana kind of stuff. I had an album of classic flash with me of my own and Jerry's And these natives of Palau worshipped the US Marine Corps because they had liberated them from Japanese rule at the end of World War II. So I was putting these USMC designs on the natives and it really opened my mind up because it was this great cultural mix of what is appropriate or what's cool. I realized that these values are totally interchangeable.

And in Japan especially, not only did I make a great connection with Mr. Kuronuma and begin to get tattooed by him, but this connection with the Rockabillies was very important, and I began going back to Japan regularly throughout the 80's. Sometimes I would make three trips a year. In Tokyo these Rockabillies and their friends began getting more and more tattoos. It developed from being a little panther head which was covered by the sleeve of a t-shirt. Then they started getting tattoos on their lower arms that were Western-style single images. Some of them even graduated to getting work on their chests and backs. But that sort of preceded this whole wave of interest in the retro look in the West and I think by the late 80's there was enough consciousness of it and enough of a resurrection of interest in general among young hipsters in the 40's and 50's that the retro look really became a trend, and through the Rockabilly bands like the Stray Cats that Bob Roberts had tattooed in New York in the early 80's. They had been into that look and they made it very big in Japan. So you had all this weird East-West fusion happening. So I think by the end of the 80's tattooing had entered a truly post-modern phase where it began to refer back on its own history.

I think by the 80's you not only got tattooing that was new and original but also all kinds of other inspirations for tattoo motifs such as tattooing from pretechnological cultures like Haida images, and then there were also tattoos from recent history such as things from the 1940's and 50's. All these levels came into play at once. It was a real mishmash. And that's still going on today. And of course the expertise of the tattoo artists and the rise of the tattoo magazines has done a lot to accelerate the process.

"Tattootime" was the first publication to be done on tattooing since Bruno in Paris who did that book (C. Bruno. "Tatoués, qui êtes vous ?" Bruxelles, Éditions de Feynerolles. 1974. 239 pp) . But it was only available in French. There was Albert Parry's book "Tattoo" which was published by Macmillan in 1933, and there was Hanns Ebenstein's "Pierced Hearts and True Love" which was published by Derek Verschoyle in Europe in about 1953. And there was "Art, Sex and Symbol" in 1973. And that was it. But these books were done by fans. They saw tattooing from the outside. They assembled a lot of great information but I think it was a crucial difference to have the kind of reporting that we were trying to do from the point of view of people who were actually doing it and had been very involved in what had been a really kind of hermetic pursuit.

And then not long after "Tattootime", the tattoo magazines started to appear, and now there's probably a dozen magazines on the stands. Those magazines made more and more images available, and then of course a lot of the tattoo suppliers were advertising in those magazines and making equipment available and so more and more people were getting into tattooing. So by the early nineties public awareness of it was at a huge high. MTV broke through and changed everybody's perception about everything. A lot of the bands were tattooed, and they were culture heroes and role models to the young people. And so it became disseminated on a much wider basis.

Today there are tremendous talents coming into it. There are people coming out of formal art school training and then just people who are quite talented and who have built on the work of the people who broke ground before to lead it into new areas. The best analogy today is that it's like very sophisticated illustration, when illustration had reached the point where so many illustrators were completely facile with the air brush and with computer graphics, using photoshop and all this other stuff. The appropriation of images has become instantaneous. There is instantaneous saturation of popular icons that immediately enter the tattoo realm. And the tattooers are plugged into all this. They're dialed into where all these things come from and so tattooing has become part of this image blitz that goes on all around the world.

For instance in Tokyo there are young tattooers running street shops that are doing very Western style work. And it's changing all the time. In that way it's different from traditional Japanese tattooing, which didn't change much until the cross-fertilization with the West. As a concrete example, when Sailor Jerry was selling pigments to Kuronuma in the 1960's in exchange for design advice he was specifically affecting the look of Japanese tattooing. He had a contact through Mr. Kida, who acted as a sort of a courier. Mr. Kida's son was studying architecture in the US and he would go back and forth a lot, stopping in Hawaii, and he was a tattoo fan who had traditional Japanese tattooing, and then he had Jerry do one of his arms with all these roses. Another tattoo fan who acted as a cultural emissary was John O'Connell, a New York businessman who was based in Japan. His secretary was tattooed and Kuronuma had done a big pair of dragons on his belly. Interestingly enough, O'Connell is mentioned as a young fan in Parry's book "Tattoo" from the thirties. He maintained his tattoo interests but only tattoo he ever got in Japan as far as I know was a pair of dragons on his belly by Kuronuma.

O'Connell would come up with photos of Kuronuma's work. Photos of Japanese tattooing were almost impossible to obtain in the sixties. There were a few copies gleaned out of those "Life" magazine articles from the war. But O'Connell had incredible photos of the most sophisticated Japanese tattooing being done. But in spite of this cultural exchange, Japanese tattooing stayed relatively static. Even now, Horiyoshi III, Mr. Nakano in Yokohama, bemoans the fact that he can't try more unusual effects or even themes within the Japanese artistic canon that could be adapted to tattooing. For instance, Zen painting. He gets to do a little bit of that, but most of his customers are like the ones in New Jersey in 1955. They want a tattoo like the one their grandfather had. Nakano has amazing talent. He's as good as it gets. Fantastic.

Actually, quite a few of the middle aged Japanese tattooers are doing Western images now just because their clients call for it. There's a guy named Horihide (not Oguri) who works in a city near Tokyo who does really strong work, but it's that folk art looking style like kite painting. So they're all kind of adapting to the modern world. Kuronuma's father, interestingly enough, had always wanted to go to America and attempted to correspond with Charlie Wagner in the twenties.

I did the second "Tattootime" in 1983, the "Tattoo Magic" issue, and right about thatime I had just broken off the association with Carafa. I had gotten him his investment back and it was apparent that our interests were diverging. I ended up doing five issues of "Tattootime" with the Hardy-Marks imprint and the layout was being done by my friends who ran Re-Search Books in San Francisco whom I met through Leo. They had actually set all the type for the first "Tattootime" but Leo and I hand-pasted it up. I did issues two, three and four of "Tattootime" while I was still living in San Francisco, and then at the end of 1986 I moved my household to Honolulu. I was going to give up publishing because I figured it was too hard to work at long distance with people in the US. And then I met someone there in Honolulu who's a really Macintosh nut, and he convinced me to buy a Mac and do the work myself. The very first book I laid out was "Tattoo Designs of Japan" with drawings by Horiyoshii III. That was in 1987.

And then I just started plugging along, cranking out books. I did books of designs like the tattoo flash book and got more and more interested in doing books that were focused on the history of the art because I found thathe idea of show casing current work was being covered ad nauseam by the tattoo magazines. And I certainly couldn't keep up with the volume of work being produced around the world. I was still running my tattoo shop, still putting on a lot of tattoos. When I moved to Hawaii I was doing this commute every two weeks, going over to San Francisco to spend two weeks there, and then I would go back to Hawaii for two weeks. And I was beginning also to do my own art work, watercolors and drawings. My emphasis in publishing shifted to the older stuff. I like seeing a lot of the new tattoos but I'm far more interested in viewing something by someone who has really developed a serious body of work over a period of time, or someone from the past who should be documented that people don't know anything about.

In the early nineties I was doing my own art work and beginning to show it in galleries. I found thathere was a tremendous dormant interest in tattooing as a subject among the "high art" world or whatever you want to call the legitimate art community because the high art world is always starved for content. So I began getting involved in organizing these exhibitions and did a show called "Rocks of Ages" with a gallery in Los Angeles, and did a book to go along with that. I invited a number of artists from different places, basically friends of mine whose work I though was interesting, to do their versions of this old kitsch religious tattoo design that I had been obsessed with when I was a kid.

Actually, the first show of tattoo designs in an art gallery was a show at the Museum of American Folk Art in 1972. That was the brainchild of very important guy named Bert Hemphill, who is the father of collecting American Folk Art. Bert had been fascinated by Folk Art when he was a kid and began collecting stuff when he was 12 and 13 years old in the days when people considered folk art to be stuff like Revolutionary era weather vanes and knot work. And he really is the seminal figure that woke everybody up to the concept thathis folk art is all around us and it has a great deal of soul and a lot of passion. Bert had done a few theme shows. He was the director of the Museum of American Folk Art, and he had done a theme show on magic.

And then he did a tattoo show. Mike Malone got wind of that and Malone was just starting to tattoo in New York, but he was primarily still working as a professional photographer. At thatime I believe that Mike Malone and Thom DaVita were the only people tattooing in New York City. After it became illegal in the early sixties the other tattooers all moved out to New Jersey and Long Island. Malone was in correspondence with me. I was trying to work on a book- even back then I was cooking on this book idea - and he contacted me and Sailor Jerry and I fed him some stuff, so he had a lot of real retro stuff. They put a fake tattoo parlor in the museum to look like Cap Coleman's tattoo shop. They borrowed some traditional Coleman flash from the Norwegian Seaman's Institute in New York. They had lots of machines, and they had some old signs and some of Wagner's stuff, but they also featured drawings and flash that Jerry and I did and photos of our work, so this was supposed to be like the "what's happening" new tattoo stuff at thatime. That was the first museum show and it got a tremendous amount of attention in New York and it got panned very heavily too because it was way ahead of its time and the art critics were saying, "this is terrible, this isn't art" and that kind of crap.

So then there was a gap of about 20 years before anything really happened. Then, I did the "Rocks of Ages" show, and soon after that I met a guy who had a gallery in Santa Monica. He was very interested in doing a tattoo show and we ended up making a show of tattoo photos because although he isn't a photography dealer he thought photos would have the most impact. That was in 1992. And we published a catalog for that show.

From there we went to this "Pierced Hearts and True Love" show that the Drawing Center approached me about . They initially approached me about that in 1992, and it took three and a half years to get that rolling because there was a funding problem. In the interim I had done the "Eye Tattooed America" show at the Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago, and I made sure there were catalogs for all these shows because I figured the documentation would certainly outlive the exhibitions.

I had a solo show of my own paintings and drawings in Chicago and Ann Nathan bought a painting of mine, and then she was fascinated by the whole tattoo thing and wanted to do some sort of a tattoo show. And she said it could be anything. So the focus of that show was tattoo-inspired art. It wasn't literally flash although it did have a little bit of historic context. But it was work by both tattooers and other artists who had been inspired by the tattoo tradition. That show was put on in 1993 and traveled to a number places in the US and the "Forever Yes" photo show traveled to a number of places. It went to Texas, Honolulu, North Carolina and San Jose. All these shows have had impact. "Pierced Hearts and True Love" is the most ambitious one, and certainly the most straight-ahead historic one. It seems to be getting a lot of attention.

I think there's going to be a lot more awareness from both sides - from tattoo people, whether they care about it or not, but they're aware that t this art form can fit in and get some kind of validation on the museum level, and then from the fine arts people who maybe have very antiquated perceptions of what tattooing is all about and don't know anything about its history and think it all started with drunks and sailors in 1920.

There have been some good reviews on the New York show ("Pierced Hearts and True Love") There was a long piece in the New York Times by their chief reviewer who took a somewhat dim view of it. The subtitle for the column was "But is it art?" and it was the typical stick-in-the-mud thing. He didn't like the things as drawings and his argument was that these things didn't hold up - thathey weren't interesting as drawings in themselves, which we all thought only showed his incompetence. Everybody in New York said it was the biggest opening they had ever seen in Soho, which is the big hot gallery district. There were about a thousand people there for the opening. The whole street was closed off. No cars could get through. People were lining up to pay to get in the door. So it was really a phenomenal opening and the whole run of the show was phenomenal. They sold hundreds and hundreds of catalogs. I made T-shirts, and sold dozens of those. The "Village Voice" gave it a full page review that was tremendously upbeat. Some of the large art magazines, including "Art Forum" did a review of it.

And they also seem to be having a great success with it here in Williamstown [Note: Hardy was speaking in February 1996, when the show "Pierced Hearts and True Love" was being exhibited at the Williams Art Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts] although this is a pretty remote New England college town. At the opening again, they had a huge amount of people and they had a rock band and drew in a lot of non-museum people. I think it will be a great success also when it goes to Miami. In southern Florida there are tons of tattoo shops.

The same thing happened the with "Eye Tattooed America" show. There were these huge rave-up crowds. I went to Terre Haut Indiana to talk there after the opening. The opening there had been the biggest one they ever experienced at this university museum, and the same thing happened everywhere. It was in Iowa, it was up in Milwaukee. In Virginia they had an almost uncontrollable mob scene at the opening. And at Laguna Beach Art Museum last summer we got the whole LA tattoo crowd and it was packed. There were more people in the museum than they had seen in years. These things are giant successes for the museums themselves, and when this show goes to San Francisco it will be a real event, because it's the middle of summer and it will tap into all the tourist people in town and it will also tap into the enormous number of tattooed people and fans in the Bay area, and California in general.

When I think of the great tattoo artists who have come along in the last twenty years - of course in the seventies Jack Rudy was very important and Good Time Charlie Cartwright because they developed the single needle technique. I think that certainly today Eddie Deutsch and Guy Atchesson from Chicago and Dan Higgs who is one of my all-time favorite tattooers - he's a visionary tattooer with a bold style. It isn't for everybody but I think he's got more emotional depth and resonance than there is in the work of all these guys who are doing extremely slick illustrative kind of stuff. And for the epitome of that monochromatic photo-realist style with a fantasy swing to it Paul Booth seems to be the most incredible. He's one of those guys who can draw with an absolutely accurate light source. He does super melodramatic stuff, really wacky and stunningly executed.

And there are a lot of other artists coming along. Tintin in France is fantastic. Again, it gets down to extremely personal taste. There are a lot of tattooers who are phenomenal technicians but I honestly don't think they have much depth or dimension or unique soul to their work. A lot of the people who are very popular and of course make vast amounts of money are just big schlockmeisters. Basically it's just highly developed kitsch. A lot of the Europeans who are doing stuff that people rave over - a lot of the people getting tattoos are just yokels who have extremely dumb taste. And so what they pick as their faves cater to that kind of dumb thing.

But when you're talking art - and I don't know even how I make that distinction - but the kind of thing that really will hold up and last and be of some real interest as the unique expression of individual that's unlike anyone has ever seen - there's very few of them. There are probably more out there in the woodwork that I don't know about. There's tons of very sincere people and I'm glad to see all the great technical proficiency. It's far better than what it used to be in the old days. But I'm kind of hard-pressed and I'm not informed enough to really say who the great people are.

Bob Roberts has had a tremendous impact. I think he's a great great tattooer. He happens to have a style that I really like. He's always been firmly based in that classic bold kind of retro thing, which he has even applied to Japanese style work. Another great tattooer is Zeke Owens. Zeke is a really important guy and a real eccentric and brilliant as a tattoo artist. He's one of the great unsung tattooers. If I did another "Tattootime" Zeke would be the center piece of it.

With this continual onslaught of coverage of everything - to me, it's too much. It's like Andy Warhol with the "Empire State Building" or "Sleep" or something. I don't want to hear any more what this guy has to say. Life's too short. The older I get the more interested I am in monitoring my time and restricting what I give my attention to. It's why I get depressed and pissed off when look at all the tattoo magazines. It's like: I just can't process this. And all the photos have been jacked up. They've all been put in photo shop and they've all been enhanced so that they crank the color up about 15%. As Malone is always saying, people come in the tattoo shop and they want a tattoo like this picture in a magazine, but it's not possible because the photo has been manipulated. I'm against that. I have an old-line thing about truth in photography. You take the photo and you get the cleanest shot you can and then you print it. But to jack it around through the computer is not doing anyone any favors.