WEBVTT - Tattoo 0:00:03.000 --> 0:00:06.160 Ephemeral is production of My Heart three d Audi album 0:00:07.600 --> 0:00:15.480 for Felix Vasure. Listen with that phones. The art of 0:00:15.480 --> 0:00:19.080 body decoration is as old as it is eye catching, 0:00:19.680 --> 0:00:23.319 and few of those decorative practices are as ancient and 0:00:23.480 --> 0:00:28.600 popular as tattooing. Today. Tattoos are everywhere. You can go 0:00:28.640 --> 0:00:33.519 into a shop ask for almost anything a symbol, quote, photo, 0:00:33.520 --> 0:00:37.080 realistic image, and an artist will almost certainly be able 0:00:37.120 --> 0:00:39.680 to a fix that image to your body. It's a 0:00:39.760 --> 0:00:45.040 poignant and permanent way to express oneself. To some extent, 0:00:45.600 --> 0:00:48.600 that fact has been true since the beginning of humankind. 0:00:49.400 --> 0:00:52.520 From then to now, tattoos have always told a story, 0:00:53.280 --> 0:00:57.040 sometimes the story of one person, other times the story 0:00:57.160 --> 0:01:01.800 of an entire people. Today, a thermal producer, Trevor Young 0:01:02.080 --> 0:01:05.600 takes us through the rich history of tattoos, starting by 0:01:05.600 --> 0:01:11.319 getting a tattoo himself. All right, all right, here we go. 0:01:14.480 --> 0:01:17.920 I'm sitting at Southern Star Tattoo in Atlanta. My friend, 0:01:18.080 --> 0:01:22.880 entrusted tattoo confidant Josh May picks up shifts here. Not bad. 0:01:24.520 --> 0:01:27.880 He's been tattooing for decades and his work is incredible. 0:01:28.520 --> 0:01:31.639 He's now finished thirteen tattoos on me over the course 0:01:31.680 --> 0:01:35.039 of three years. Today I'm getting another one on my 0:01:35.160 --> 0:01:38.240 right arm, a simple black symbol connected to a band 0:01:38.319 --> 0:01:41.840 I like personally. I've always found the experience of getting 0:01:41.840 --> 0:01:45.160 a tattoo to be exhilarating in the moment and intrinsically 0:01:45.160 --> 0:01:49.480 fulfilling in the long term, more spiritual sense. In short, 0:01:49.680 --> 0:01:52.320 my tattoos have become a primary source of my outward 0:01:52.320 --> 0:01:58.400 identity away for me to tell my story. People committed 0:01:58.440 --> 0:02:03.720 the shop in the say I need this tattoo. It's 0:02:03.720 --> 0:02:06.120 not that I want this tattoo or I'm going to 0:02:06.160 --> 0:02:10.720 get this tattoo. I need this tattoo, So there's something 0:02:10.800 --> 0:02:15.240 happening there. My name is Chuck Eldridge. I'm the co 0:02:15.400 --> 0:02:19.240 owner and operator of the Tattoo Archive, located in Winston Salem, 0:02:19.240 --> 0:02:24.000 North Carolina. The Tattoo Archive is all about discovering connections 0:02:24.280 --> 0:02:27.640 across different times and cultures as it relates to tattoo. 0:02:28.360 --> 0:02:31.200 Chuck has devoted his life to this research, and what 0:02:31.320 --> 0:02:34.120 he's found is that tattoo is a time honored and 0:02:34.280 --> 0:02:40.400 universally beloved tradition. Tattooing it was practiced around the world. 0:02:40.840 --> 0:02:43.480 I don't think there's a tribe or a group of 0:02:43.520 --> 0:02:47.639 people anywhere in the world that doesn't engage in some 0:02:47.760 --> 0:02:51.520 form of body decoration. Now sometimes it's still body painting 0:02:51.919 --> 0:02:55.520 in many of those esprecially some African tribes, and of 0:02:55.560 --> 0:02:59.160 course they get into scarification as well. But it seems 0:02:59.240 --> 0:03:03.079 like it's something in our nature. I don't know, it's 0:03:03.080 --> 0:03:05.919 almost like it's in the d n A of our 0:03:06.040 --> 0:03:12.000 body to mark our body, to have that group identity. 0:03:12.919 --> 0:03:16.400 For Chuck, it's always been about community, and in his case, 0:03:16.880 --> 0:03:20.480 that tattoo community came around very early on in life. 0:03:22.120 --> 0:03:26.359 I was born in a little cotton mill town called Elkin, 0:03:26.440 --> 0:03:32.480 North Carolina, and my father, my brother, my uncle's all 0:03:32.560 --> 0:03:35.680 had service related tattoos, so I grew up seeing them 0:03:35.880 --> 0:03:40.000 my whole childhood, and UM really liked them. I love 0:03:40.080 --> 0:03:42.960 the look of them. Um. I can remember getting my 0:03:43.040 --> 0:03:45.720 uncle's to tell me the stories about how they got them, 0:03:45.760 --> 0:03:48.680 and at the age of eight I decided I wanted tattoos. 0:03:48.680 --> 0:03:51.600 And then it was a decade when I was in 0:03:51.640 --> 0:03:54.200 the Navy at eighteen that I was able to get 0:03:54.240 --> 0:03:58.640 my first tattoo. I did boot camp in San Diego, California, 0:03:58.920 --> 0:04:02.840 and after team weeks, they gave us twelve hours of 0:04:02.920 --> 0:04:06.040 liberty and two hundred dollars and turned to slose in 0:04:06.080 --> 0:04:09.520 San Diego. So I was able to get four tattoos 0:04:09.560 --> 0:04:13.160 that day in three different shops. The first one I 0:04:13.200 --> 0:04:16.120 got with a little sailor girl on my forearm. So 0:04:16.240 --> 0:04:19.760 that was kind of the start of my collection. After 0:04:19.839 --> 0:04:22.680 four years in the Navy, I came out in nineteen 0:04:23.240 --> 0:04:28.520 nine and probably had thirty five tattoos maybe, so the 0:04:28.560 --> 0:04:31.200 collection had been growing. I was stationed in Texas, and 0:04:31.240 --> 0:04:35.040 then I was aboard ship into Hong Kong and the Philippines, 0:04:35.120 --> 0:04:39.479 and so I collected there. Chuck says the experience of 0:04:39.520 --> 0:04:43.720 getting a tattoo was very different back then. All the 0:04:43.760 --> 0:04:46.720 shops in San Diego then majority of more on Broadway, 0:04:46.760 --> 0:04:49.159 which is kind of like the main street in San Diego, 0:04:49.720 --> 0:04:52.960 and it's a sailor town, so the sidewalks are just 0:04:53.200 --> 0:04:57.440 full of sailors in uniform. They were literally lined up 0:04:57.920 --> 0:05:00.800 to get into the tattoo shop. And a lot of 0:05:00.800 --> 0:05:05.360 the shops were in kind of large bowlden alleys shaped buildings, 0:05:05.400 --> 0:05:09.000 you know, deep and skinny. It was noisy and loud, 0:05:09.080 --> 0:05:12.680 and all the tattooers were old men. They were all 0:05:12.800 --> 0:05:16.000 from the Second World War, in the Korean War, there 0:05:16.000 --> 0:05:22.080 were no young people tattooing, and there were no women tattooing. Stylistically, 0:05:22.520 --> 0:05:27.560 tattooing itself was also very different back then. There were 0:05:27.920 --> 0:05:31.720 all the specialties that we held now. There wasn't photo realism, 0:05:31.760 --> 0:05:36.200 there wasn't black and gray, there wasn't abstract, there wasn't watercolor. 0:05:36.440 --> 0:05:40.840 So tattoo was a tattoo was a tattoo. There was 0:05:40.880 --> 0:05:44.520 a kind of a set group of patterns that have 0:05:44.680 --> 0:05:48.400 been reproduced for, you know, hundreds of years, so there 0:05:48.480 --> 0:05:51.000 was kind of a uniformity to it. There was something 0:05:51.560 --> 0:05:56.560 familiar and comforting to those designs. There's a reason most 0:05:56.560 --> 0:06:01.440 of the tattoo clientele were originally sailors. They came to 0:06:01.520 --> 0:06:05.440 the Navy more so than the Army and the Air 0:06:05.480 --> 0:06:08.680 Force and such as that, just because the Navy was 0:06:08.760 --> 0:06:11.919 going to these exotic places. They were going into the 0:06:11.960 --> 0:06:15.839 South Pacific, where tattooing was was popular and was normal. 0:06:16.560 --> 0:06:20.160 Whenever you travel, for me, certainly, I always want to 0:06:20.200 --> 0:06:25.400 bring back some souvenir of that travel, and so sailors 0:06:26.040 --> 0:06:29.120 board ship, you don't have a lot of room, so 0:06:29.200 --> 0:06:33.240 you can't bring back anything of any kind of physical size. 0:06:33.800 --> 0:06:38.280 So those tattoos worked as souvenirs. They could bring those 0:06:38.320 --> 0:06:40.760 back and they would have them, and they could tell 0:06:40.800 --> 0:06:43.039 the story about getting those, and so it was. It 0:06:43.120 --> 0:06:47.000 was a souvenir that you could carry with you. Chuck's 0:06:47.040 --> 0:06:51.440 path to professional tattooing after leaving the Navy was unique. 0:06:52.680 --> 0:06:57.239 I actually came to tattooing later than most people. Most people, 0:06:57.279 --> 0:06:59.680 if they had had all that interest when they were young, 0:07:00.080 --> 0:07:03.400 they would have ended up hand poking their friends. That 0:07:03.440 --> 0:07:07.080 would have been the beginning of their tattoo career. But 0:07:07.480 --> 0:07:10.840 I took a different path. I ended up deciding out 0:07:10.880 --> 0:07:14.240 of the Navy. I had the g I Bill for 0:07:14.280 --> 0:07:17.680 four years. They gave me free education, so I decided 0:07:17.800 --> 0:07:20.679 to use that. And I decided I wanted to build 0:07:20.680 --> 0:07:25.280 custom bicycles. So I went to a welding school in 0:07:25.320 --> 0:07:28.440 North Carolina and learned to weld um. I worked in 0:07:28.560 --> 0:07:32.160 bicycle shops to get my mechanic skills up, and then 0:07:32.160 --> 0:07:35.920 I traveled to California to try to get a job 0:07:36.400 --> 0:07:40.480 with a frame builder there named Albert Eisenrout. So I 0:07:40.600 --> 0:07:43.040 was pursuing that, I thought, Okay, I'm going to be 0:07:43.080 --> 0:07:46.320 a bicycle frame builder. That's my lot in life. And 0:07:46.360 --> 0:07:50.080 I was still getting tattooed through this whole period, collecting 0:07:50.080 --> 0:07:53.080 here and there as I traveled and owned my way 0:07:53.480 --> 0:07:57.000 from North Carolina to California. I had gone through Chicago 0:07:57.280 --> 0:07:59.960 and I had gotten tattooed thereby a fella in Cliff 0:08:00.120 --> 0:08:04.920 Raven who was a really up and coming tattooer. And 0:08:05.000 --> 0:08:07.400 when I was getting tattooed by him, I mentioned that 0:08:07.440 --> 0:08:09.640 I was on my way to California and he says, well, 0:08:09.760 --> 0:08:11.640 you know, when you get out to San Francisco, look 0:08:11.720 --> 0:08:13.920 up this guy named Ed Hardy if you want to 0:08:13.920 --> 0:08:16.520 get to tattoo. So I just kind of filed that 0:08:16.600 --> 0:08:19.880 away in my brain. So once I got settled, I 0:08:19.920 --> 0:08:23.200 actually started looking for Ed. So I got over to 0:08:23.280 --> 0:08:26.400 his shop in San Francisco, and as soon as I 0:08:26.440 --> 0:08:28.720 went in the shop, you just go, oh, man, this 0:08:28.800 --> 0:08:32.839 is this is something different. He had big Japanese style 0:08:32.960 --> 0:08:37.160 body pieces and full sleeve drawings and stuff. So I 0:08:37.240 --> 0:08:41.400 realized that this was the place to get all those 0:08:41.880 --> 0:08:46.959 random tattoos tied together into a set of sleeves. So 0:08:47.200 --> 0:08:50.920 I did an apprenticeship there. Unfortunately, there was a fire. 0:08:51.320 --> 0:08:54.400 The shock was destroyed. After actually even less than a 0:08:54.480 --> 0:08:59.560 year I was living in Berkeley. I just decided to 0:08:59.600 --> 0:09:02.400 open my own shop. I had my own ideas of 0:09:02.480 --> 0:09:06.720 what I wanted a shop to look like. In seventy nine, 0:09:07.320 --> 0:09:12.119 I opened that shop in Berkeley, and I kept anguishing 0:09:12.160 --> 0:09:15.240 over what am I going to call this place? Is 0:09:15.240 --> 0:09:17.959 it going to be Chuck's tattoo shop or I mean, 0:09:18.000 --> 0:09:21.400 I didn't I didn't know. And one day, I mean, 0:09:21.440 --> 0:09:26.199 I bicycled by this this store, the Pacific Film Archive, 0:09:27.080 --> 0:09:30.800 which is an amazing film mark I've there in Berkeley, 0:09:30.920 --> 0:09:33.800 and somehow that day that I rode by, that word 0:09:33.960 --> 0:09:37.240 archive just leaped off the side of the building into 0:09:37.360 --> 0:09:39.800 my face. So I said, at that moment, Okay, it's 0:09:39.800 --> 0:09:42.840 going to be the tattoo work. That's it. That's the one, 0:09:44.080 --> 0:09:48.720 the tattoo archive. The shop eventually became a literal tattoo archive. 0:09:50.120 --> 0:09:52.880 You know, with tattooing. It doesn't take a lot of 0:09:52.880 --> 0:09:55.640 space to do tattooing, you know too con tattoo and 0:09:55.840 --> 0:09:57.880 a tin by tin room, you know, and have a 0:09:57.960 --> 0:10:01.600 nice space. So I denoted most the building the space 0:10:02.240 --> 0:10:07.200 for historical stuff. I worked away there and vote newsletters 0:10:07.240 --> 0:10:11.200 and wrote for other newsletters and um would do slide shows, 0:10:11.360 --> 0:10:14.640 history slide shows at conventions and stuff like this, trying 0:10:14.640 --> 0:10:18.320 to keep those old time tattoos names alive. The reason 0:10:18.400 --> 0:10:20.800 we have such a clear view of what's going on 0:10:20.960 --> 0:10:25.640 is because we're standing on their shoulders. Eventually, Chuck started 0:10:25.640 --> 0:10:27.920 to feel more inspired by his work with the archive 0:10:28.320 --> 0:10:32.360 than by his work in the shop. Tattooing was horrifying. 0:10:33.440 --> 0:10:36.679 There's there's no other way to describe it. For me, 0:10:37.200 --> 0:10:41.200 I never felt that I had it the thing, you 0:10:41.240 --> 0:10:43.360 know what I mean. You you see some artists and 0:10:44.080 --> 0:10:47.360 they can draw anything in an instant, and you look 0:10:47.400 --> 0:10:50.560 at it and you go, it's perfect. I never had that. 0:10:50.800 --> 0:10:55.640 So I've labored over all that, and it was stressful 0:10:56.240 --> 0:11:00.600 preparing all that artwork in advance. It was easier to 0:11:00.600 --> 0:11:02.640 get it to where the customer was happy with it 0:11:02.679 --> 0:11:04.600 than it was to where I was happy with it. 0:11:05.160 --> 0:11:08.960 And my first tattoo was a little tiny ant I'll 0:11:09.000 --> 0:11:14.679 never forget on this guy's arm. I sweated, you know 0:11:14.720 --> 0:11:16.880 what I mean, it was it was. It was horrible. 0:11:16.920 --> 0:11:20.120 So that improved a little bit, you know, in thirty 0:11:20.240 --> 0:11:23.760 or forty years, but they were still always really stressful. 0:11:25.200 --> 0:11:29.200 After the archive grew, Chuck devoted himself almost exclusively to 0:11:29.280 --> 0:11:32.160 his work as a historian. If you visit the Tattoo 0:11:32.240 --> 0:11:36.360 Archive website, you'll quickly see just how extensive his research is. 0:11:37.280 --> 0:11:39.320 I asked Chuck to take us back to the beginning, 0:11:39.920 --> 0:11:43.080 to the very origins of what we now know as tattoo. 0:11:44.880 --> 0:11:49.600 Tattooing started as body paint, and he goes back to 0:11:49.640 --> 0:11:55.320 the caveman. They would take dirt, red dirt, mix it 0:11:55.400 --> 0:11:58.880 with water, paint their bodies. They would take clay, mix 0:11:59.000 --> 0:12:01.800 that and paint their bodies. And this would be done 0:12:02.040 --> 0:12:05.800 in a ritual situation. Women would have their first child, 0:12:05.920 --> 0:12:09.240 when they could be buried, when men would go and 0:12:09.320 --> 0:12:12.480 have hunts and make their first kill, and all these 0:12:12.559 --> 0:12:15.240 kind of things that would be celebrations around this, and 0:12:15.320 --> 0:12:17.719 the bodies would be painted and there would be specific 0:12:17.800 --> 0:12:20.800 images and shapes that would be painted on the body 0:12:21.240 --> 0:12:26.439 to convey the specific ritual that they were celebrating. Once 0:12:26.559 --> 0:12:30.720 the caveman had fire, then they actually had a pigment 0:12:31.280 --> 0:12:34.440 that they could push into the skin where they actually 0:12:34.559 --> 0:12:39.360 could tattoo. And that's soit it's burnt down to a 0:12:39.480 --> 0:12:42.680 fine granular's form, and you mix that with water and 0:12:42.920 --> 0:12:47.600 you get a porcupine quill or a bird bone that 0:12:47.679 --> 0:12:50.560 had been shaped in the shape of a needle, and 0:12:50.600 --> 0:12:54.600 you could literally push that sit under the skin and 0:12:54.640 --> 0:12:59.439 then create a tattoo. As a specific example, there was 0:12:59.520 --> 0:13:04.040 one group of nomadic people who embraced tattoo before anyone else. 0:13:05.400 --> 0:13:07.320 If you really want to go back, you can go 0:13:07.400 --> 0:13:11.280 back to the Scythians. They were a very advanced tribe. 0:13:11.360 --> 0:13:14.680 They were doing metal work. They would do really large 0:13:14.880 --> 0:13:19.120 animal tattoos. They would be basically just outlines because they 0:13:19.120 --> 0:13:22.520 didn't have color pigment, and you know, they had crewed 0:13:22.640 --> 0:13:26.200 tools for doing the tattoos, so they were mainly outlines, 0:13:26.280 --> 0:13:29.640 but they covered a lot of their body. And then 0:13:29.800 --> 0:13:33.160 there are the Maori tribes in New Zealand. Many of 0:13:33.200 --> 0:13:37.200 today's popular tribal looking tattoos are directly inspired by the 0:13:37.200 --> 0:13:43.800 Maori people's work. Although the Maori's really only tattooed their 0:13:43.880 --> 0:13:47.520 face and their buttocks. That was pretty much where it 0:13:47.640 --> 0:13:51.640 was limited before Captain Cook and his crew got there 0:13:51.640 --> 0:13:55.079 in the seventeen hundreds into New Zealand. They actually had 0:13:55.120 --> 0:13:58.880 no written language, so their face tattoos would tell the 0:13:58.920 --> 0:14:03.640 story of that person life, their occupation, their tribe, their 0:14:03.679 --> 0:14:06.200 family connections, and all this kind of stuff would be 0:14:06.240 --> 0:14:10.560 told in their tattoos. If you go back and you 0:14:10.800 --> 0:14:14.760 start looking at ancient photographs of the Maoris, those tattoos 0:14:14.760 --> 0:14:18.600 were so ritualistic and so family oriented that when the 0:14:18.679 --> 0:14:22.800 chiefs would die, their heads would be removed and they 0:14:22.800 --> 0:14:26.920 would be smoked to where they would preserve them. The 0:14:27.000 --> 0:14:29.720 heads would go on display in the mattle inside their 0:14:29.760 --> 0:14:33.280 homes so that the children coming up could read the 0:14:33.320 --> 0:14:37.000 story of their ancestors. They had an amazing culture that way. 0:14:37.360 --> 0:14:40.640 If you travel in New Zealand, it's it's a tattoo wonderland. 0:14:41.040 --> 0:14:46.560 Every place you go, every gift shop, bookshop, museum. Tattoo 0:14:46.600 --> 0:14:52.920 culture is everywhere. The imagery it's amazing. Another region with 0:14:52.960 --> 0:14:58.480 a storied and complicated history of tattooing is Japan. Japanese 0:14:58.560 --> 0:15:02.840 tattooing is a lot like American tattooing in the fact 0:15:03.320 --> 0:15:07.240 that there's a hundred and fifty or two hundred images 0:15:07.400 --> 0:15:11.160 or something that's kind of been codified in their artwork, 0:15:11.280 --> 0:15:16.400 especially in their tattooing, and these tattooers do these images 0:15:16.480 --> 0:15:19.000 over and over and over. They rendered them in their 0:15:19.120 --> 0:15:22.040 fashion and stuff, and a lot of those images come 0:15:22.080 --> 0:15:26.480 from a specific woodblock series, Warrior Prints, that was done 0:15:26.760 --> 0:15:30.400 I guess probably in the seventeen hundreds, maybe maybe even 0:15:30.400 --> 0:15:33.440 a little earlier. But there was a series of artists 0:15:33.600 --> 0:15:38.480 that specialized in doing tattoo related woodblocks and woodblocks. They 0:15:38.480 --> 0:15:42.880 were like ephemera. They were printed own woodblocks and on paper. 0:15:43.400 --> 0:15:46.960 They weren't considered high art. They were like pop art, 0:15:47.040 --> 0:15:50.760 if you will, kind of pop culture. So those were fragile, 0:15:50.840 --> 0:15:52.720 and I mean a lot of them have survived and 0:15:52.720 --> 0:15:54.760 and sell for big money now, but they were a 0:15:54.880 --> 0:15:58.480 very kind of ephemeral kind of art form. But they 0:15:58.520 --> 0:16:01.760 influenced the tattooers, and I just bet some of the 0:16:01.760 --> 0:16:06.880 tattoos were probably woodblock artist as well. The Japanese, of course, 0:16:07.360 --> 0:16:12.120 completely look at tattoos in a different set of eyes, 0:16:12.200 --> 0:16:16.040 if you will. For an American, a small tattoo is 0:16:16.160 --> 0:16:21.120 an ant on your arm. For a Japanese tattoo fan, 0:16:21.640 --> 0:16:26.640 a half sleeve is a start. They took the palette 0:16:27.200 --> 0:16:32.480 and just enlarged it to an extreme degree, from wrist 0:16:32.640 --> 0:16:37.520 to neck two ankles. With the Japanese, they've definitely advanced it, 0:16:37.760 --> 0:16:41.320 and I think the Japanese tattoos are still on the 0:16:41.360 --> 0:16:48.480 forefront of spectacular bodywork politically and socially. However, Japan was 0:16:48.640 --> 0:16:53.320 very slow to embrace tattoos. Tattooing in Japan was looked 0:16:53.320 --> 0:16:57.320 at as an outsider art. Today it is connected with 0:16:57.360 --> 0:17:02.040 the yakaza, which is Japanese mafia, and I think that 0:17:02.080 --> 0:17:07.560 has hindered tattooing advancing in Japan. At one time, you 0:17:07.680 --> 0:17:11.720 could literally be in Japan and walked by a tattoo 0:17:11.760 --> 0:17:15.000 shop for years and never even know it was there. 0:17:15.680 --> 0:17:18.679 There was no signage. You had to have introductions to 0:17:18.720 --> 0:17:22.120 even get through the door of the tattoo shop. They 0:17:22.200 --> 0:17:26.000 labored in obscurity in a way that has changed now 0:17:26.280 --> 0:17:30.600 there are street shops in Japan, very often American looking 0:17:30.640 --> 0:17:35.680 street shops with flashy neon and strobe lights. The Japanese 0:17:35.720 --> 0:17:38.600 had kind of a mixed feeling about tattoos. They had 0:17:38.640 --> 0:17:42.520 advanced it to a high degree and was respected worldwide, 0:17:43.040 --> 0:17:47.440 but the straight Japanese uh they saw it as bad. 0:17:47.760 --> 0:17:51.120 They saw it as gangster. You can only imagine where 0:17:51.119 --> 0:17:53.840 it would gone if it had been more accepted, if 0:17:53.920 --> 0:17:58.400 that had been something that would have been less underground 0:17:58.440 --> 0:18:12.320 and less negative, how far would they have gone Most 0:18:12.359 --> 0:18:14.840 historians will tell you that tattoo made its way to 0:18:14.880 --> 0:18:18.880 North America from Europe, although as Chuck points out, that's 0:18:18.880 --> 0:18:24.560 actually false. All the native tribes in North America, long 0:18:24.640 --> 0:18:28.680 before the white men ever set foot on North America, 0:18:29.359 --> 0:18:33.639 all had some form of body decoration. They had progressed 0:18:33.680 --> 0:18:36.920 that where that was, that was normal. They were already 0:18:36.960 --> 0:18:41.400 doing puncture tattooing by the time the white man got here. 0:18:42.520 --> 0:18:46.960 But for professional tattooing, it was actually it came from England. 0:18:47.320 --> 0:18:53.040 In Germany. The early shops from the undreds and they 0:18:53.119 --> 0:18:57.240 were initially in New York because that's where the immigrants 0:18:57.280 --> 0:18:59.560 came in. They just got off the boat and went 0:18:59.640 --> 0:19:02.720 to the bery and found the store front and set 0:19:02.800 --> 0:19:09.240 up shop, and for probably a hundred years that continued 0:19:09.560 --> 0:19:14.200 in that fashion. Tattooing was mainly isolated to the coast 0:19:14.920 --> 0:19:19.120 where the ports were, where the navy was, and then 0:19:19.400 --> 0:19:24.159 as America built more military bases in the middle of 0:19:24.160 --> 0:19:30.320 the country, tattoos began to congregate around them. Generally, if 0:19:30.359 --> 0:19:33.000 there was tattooing in the middle of the country, in 0:19:33.040 --> 0:19:35.760 the middle of North America, it was around a military 0:19:35.760 --> 0:19:39.160 base because that was your bread and butter was tattooing 0:19:39.200 --> 0:19:43.320 the military. You would get a few civilian clients, but 0:19:43.760 --> 0:19:46.920 not enough to pay the rent. You stayed alive from 0:19:46.920 --> 0:19:50.000 pay day to pay day, and sometimes you would stay 0:19:50.040 --> 0:19:53.520 open three days straight if you had the staff to 0:19:53.720 --> 0:19:56.960 keep the shop going. Now it's to the point where 0:19:57.080 --> 0:20:00.280 if you're a young, aspiring tattooeder, if you've got ills, 0:20:00.320 --> 0:20:03.560 you don't even need to leave your little hometown. The 0:20:03.680 --> 0:20:07.560 world will beat a path to your door. Still, in 0:20:07.600 --> 0:20:12.000 those early days, tattoo thrived primarily on the coasts. It 0:20:12.160 --> 0:20:15.520 was nautical. It was around port towns. Those sailors you know, 0:20:15.640 --> 0:20:19.440 had traveled into the South Pacific. Captain Cook's crew came 0:20:19.480 --> 0:20:23.480 back from the South Pacific in New Zealand and with tattoos, 0:20:23.600 --> 0:20:26.760 so they brought them back. Once those islands in the 0:20:26.800 --> 0:20:31.200 South Pacific were charted with the latitude and longitude where 0:20:31.240 --> 0:20:34.480 people can actually find them again, you have to realize 0:20:34.520 --> 0:20:37.720 that these islands were like little specks in the middle 0:20:37.760 --> 0:20:41.200 of this massive body of water, so you could sail 0:20:41.320 --> 0:20:43.879 past it for hundreds of years and never even know 0:20:44.000 --> 0:20:47.840 that the island was there. But once Cook got that 0:20:48.040 --> 0:20:52.560 latitude and longitude in place, the next group of people 0:20:52.640 --> 0:20:57.960 to those islands were missionaries to begin with, and then explorers. 0:20:58.680 --> 0:21:03.960 Those explorers would find tattooed people and bring them back 0:21:04.680 --> 0:21:08.600 to England and back to America to show them for 0:21:08.800 --> 0:21:11.600 money to create the early side shows. That had a 0:21:11.680 --> 0:21:15.760 big impact, especially in North America and in England, because 0:21:15.880 --> 0:21:18.159 people would go to these circuces and side shows and 0:21:18.200 --> 0:21:20.960 they would see these tattoo attractions that had come from 0:21:20.960 --> 0:21:24.360 the South Pacific. Then they would go, that's cool. I think, 0:21:24.760 --> 0:21:27.800 what can I find one of those tattoo things? So 0:21:27.840 --> 0:21:29.680 I think that was kind of the beginning of that. 0:21:31.119 --> 0:21:33.760 It was around this time that the first tattoo machines 0:21:33.840 --> 0:21:39.000 came around and they revolutionized the process. The electric machine 0:21:39.200 --> 0:21:42.680 was invented by a fellow named Samuel O'Reilly mid to 0:21:42.760 --> 0:21:46.399 late eight hundreds, and he was inspired by Thomas Edison. 0:21:46.720 --> 0:21:51.280 An invention that Edison had called the stencil pen, which 0:21:51.480 --> 0:21:57.040 was a office tool for duplicating letters. And literally it 0:21:57.160 --> 0:21:59.880 was a pen type machine that was had an electric 0:22:00.040 --> 0:22:03.960 motor and a vibrating needle and you would take your 0:22:04.000 --> 0:22:07.040 original copy of your letter that you needed to duplicate 0:22:07.200 --> 0:22:09.360 and put it on a little phone pad and then 0:22:09.520 --> 0:22:13.120 you would ride over that the needle would puncture holes 0:22:13.320 --> 0:22:16.360 into the paper. Then you would take that and put 0:22:16.400 --> 0:22:18.879 it on a clean sheet and then take an inked 0:22:19.080 --> 0:22:22.760 roller roll over that. The ink would absorb through the 0:22:22.800 --> 0:22:26.520 holes and it would give you effects simile of the document. 0:22:27.000 --> 0:22:30.000 Of course, this is pre typewriter, so this is like 0:22:30.119 --> 0:22:35.080 early office technology. It was eclipsed within a year or 0:22:35.119 --> 0:22:40.040 so because the typewriter came O'Reilly was a Irish immigrant 0:22:40.400 --> 0:22:43.600 that came to America in the eighteen hundred. You saw 0:22:43.680 --> 0:22:47.600 the Edison stencil pen and goes I could tattoo with that. 0:22:48.480 --> 0:22:52.600 The machine evolved along and if you were a tattoo 0:22:52.960 --> 0:22:55.879 in the thirties forties, you almost had to be a 0:22:55.880 --> 0:22:59.800 mechanic because you had to maintain that equipment. Sometimes the 0:23:00.119 --> 0:23:03.960 tours had a serious mechanical skills, and so they would 0:23:04.000 --> 0:23:07.240 just start building their own machines that have them cast 0:23:07.320 --> 0:23:09.879 and they would wrap the coils and the machine was 0:23:09.880 --> 0:23:13.359 a kind of a constant evolution. Although you look at 0:23:13.359 --> 0:23:16.080 the tattoo machine a coil machine, and they all kind 0:23:16.080 --> 0:23:19.960 of looked the same, but there's subtleties inside that design. 0:23:20.800 --> 0:23:24.400 My analogy is the caveman invented the wheel and it's 0:23:24.440 --> 0:23:28.440 still round, so the twin coil machines still looks the same, 0:23:28.480 --> 0:23:32.160 but there's it's gotten more sophisticated, if you will. And 0:23:32.480 --> 0:23:36.400 many of these tattoos that had those mechanical skills actually 0:23:36.480 --> 0:23:40.600 became tattoo suppliers. They would go into a business, and 0:23:40.680 --> 0:23:46.000 sometimes the supply business would begin to overshadow their tattoo business. 0:23:46.040 --> 0:23:50.440 So this became a whole industry in itself. As Chuck 0:23:50.440 --> 0:23:54.960 mentioned earlier, American tattoo design became codified into a handful 0:23:55.000 --> 0:23:58.560 of simple, repeatable images. I asked him to explain, with 0:23:58.640 --> 0:24:02.440 that traditional tattoo design, it looks like it's a design 0:24:02.520 --> 0:24:06.879 with a solid black outline. There's enough black shading in 0:24:06.960 --> 0:24:10.399 it to make it hold up thirty years from now 0:24:10.680 --> 0:24:15.640 when all the colored dims, and then it's colored with 0:24:15.720 --> 0:24:19.160 probably three or four basic colors, black, red, green, maybe 0:24:19.160 --> 0:24:22.679 a little brown or yellow. To my eye, that is 0:24:22.760 --> 0:24:26.920 a kind of a traditional tattoo design. Obviously, the imagery 0:24:27.480 --> 0:24:30.600 can be wild and crazy, doesn't have to be an 0:24:30.600 --> 0:24:33.520 anchor or sailor girl. But it's the way it's it's 0:24:33.600 --> 0:24:37.879 rendered it kind of makes it a traditional tattoo design. 0:24:39.240 --> 0:24:42.399 Then that design involves with the emersions of one of 0:24:42.440 --> 0:24:48.320 the most popular artists and styles Sailor Jerry. Sailor Jerry 0:24:48.480 --> 0:24:53.960 was a Honolulu tattooer that actually got his start in Chicago, 0:24:54.480 --> 0:24:58.120 moved to Honolulu and tattoo. They're kind of off and on. 0:24:58.320 --> 0:25:00.280 He kind of took a couple of break because and 0:25:00.359 --> 0:25:02.879 came back in the sixties as almost kind of a 0:25:03.000 --> 0:25:09.600 reinvented man and created this amazing volume of work because 0:25:09.600 --> 0:25:14.720 he sat there in Honolulu between North America, which had 0:25:14.760 --> 0:25:19.000 in the forties, fifties, sixties had a wealth of amazing 0:25:19.040 --> 0:25:25.160 tattooers working in North America in Japan. He took those 0:25:25.400 --> 0:25:30.040 two influences and blended them in a way that it 0:25:30.119 --> 0:25:33.600 hadn't been done before. It was a good water colorist, 0:25:33.920 --> 0:25:36.919 so he was able to take those images that we 0:25:37.000 --> 0:25:41.879 had seen, those codified images and reinvent them, and it 0:25:42.040 --> 0:25:46.560 was extremely attractive. It was kind of the classic folk 0:25:46.720 --> 0:25:52.240 art style of tattooing. There was another style that developed 0:25:52.280 --> 0:25:55.199 around the same time as Sailor Jerry, one that was 0:25:55.280 --> 0:25:59.720 less commercially popular, but equally provocative and important, and that 0:26:00.040 --> 0:26:03.480 is prison tattooing. You have a group of men or 0:26:03.520 --> 0:26:07.360 women locked up, maybe they don't look at it as 0:26:07.400 --> 0:26:10.400 a souvenir of their time in prison, but it certainly 0:26:10.520 --> 0:26:14.760 is a mark of their time in prison that they 0:26:14.840 --> 0:26:19.600 want to have. Sometimes you're actually almost required to have it. 0:26:20.040 --> 0:26:23.560 You're gonna have to choose sides in there, and each 0:26:23.600 --> 0:26:27.000 side is going to have their markings and their logos 0:26:27.040 --> 0:26:30.959 and their wording and their lettering, and that associates you 0:26:31.040 --> 0:26:34.600 with that side. Not that far removed how the Marri's were. 0:26:35.200 --> 0:26:40.639 All the parallels are sometimes mind boggling actually how it works. Obviously, 0:26:41.160 --> 0:26:45.440 they didn't have access in prisons to needles. I mean 0:26:45.480 --> 0:26:47.800 maybe they did sewing needles, but you know those those 0:26:47.880 --> 0:26:51.639