Speaker 1: Ephemeral is production of My Heart three d Audi album
Speaker 1: for Felix Vasure. Listen with that phones. The art of
Speaker 1: body decoration is as old as it is eye catching,
Speaker 1: and few of those decorative practices are as ancient and
Speaker 1: popular as tattooing. Today. Tattoos are everywhere. You can go
Speaker 1: into a shop ask for almost anything a symbol, quote, photo,
Speaker 1: realistic image, and an artist will almost certainly be able
Speaker 1: to a fix that image to your body. It's a
Speaker 1: poignant and permanent way to express oneself. To some extent,
Speaker 1: that fact has been true since the beginning of humankind.
Speaker 1: From then to now, tattoos have always told a story,
Speaker 1: sometimes the story of one person, other times the story
Speaker 1: of an entire people. Today, a thermal producer, Trevor Young
Speaker 1: takes us through the rich history of tattoos, starting by
Speaker 1: getting a tattoo himself. All right, all right, here we go.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting at Southern Star Tattoo in Atlanta. My friend,
Speaker 1: entrusted tattoo confidant Josh May picks up shifts here. Not bad.
Speaker 1: He's been tattooing for decades and his work is incredible.
Speaker 1: He's now finished thirteen tattoos on me over the course
Speaker 1: of three years. Today I'm getting another one on my
Speaker 1: right arm, a simple black symbol connected to a band
Speaker 1: I like personally. I've always found the experience of getting
Speaker 1: a tattoo to be exhilarating in the moment and intrinsically
Speaker 1: fulfilling in the long term, more spiritual sense. In short,
Speaker 1: my tattoos have become a primary source of my outward
Speaker 1: identity away for me to tell my story. People committed
Speaker 1: the shop in the say I need this tattoo. It's
Speaker 1: not that I want this tattoo or I'm going to
Speaker 1: get this tattoo. I need this tattoo, So there's something
Speaker 1: happening there. My name is Chuck Eldridge. I'm the co
Speaker 1: owner and operator of the Tattoo Archive, located in Winston Salem,
Speaker 1: North Carolina. The Tattoo Archive is all about discovering connections
Speaker 1: across different times and cultures as it relates to tattoo.
Speaker 1: Chuck has devoted his life to this research, and what
Speaker 1: he's found is that tattoo is a time honored and
Speaker 1: universally beloved tradition. Tattooing it was practiced around the world.
Speaker 1: I don't think there's a tribe or a group of
Speaker 1: people anywhere in the world that doesn't engage in some
Speaker 1: form of body decoration. Now sometimes it's still body painting
Speaker 1: in many of those esprecially some African tribes, and of
Speaker 1: course they get into scarification as well. But it seems
Speaker 1: like it's something in our nature. I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: almost like it's in the d n A of our
Speaker 1: body to mark our body, to have that group identity.
Speaker 1: For Chuck, it's always been about community, and in his case,
Speaker 1: that tattoo community came around very early on in life.
Speaker 1: I was born in a little cotton mill town called Elkin,
Speaker 1: North Carolina, and my father, my brother, my uncle's all
Speaker 1: had service related tattoos, so I grew up seeing them
Speaker 1: my whole childhood, and UM really liked them. I love
Speaker 1: the look of them. Um. I can remember getting my
Speaker 1: uncle's to tell me the stories about how they got them,
Speaker 1: and at the age of eight I decided I wanted tattoos.
Speaker 1: And then it was a decade when I was in
Speaker 1: the Navy at eighteen that I was able to get
Speaker 1: my first tattoo. I did boot camp in San Diego, California,
Speaker 1: and after team weeks, they gave us twelve hours of
Speaker 1: liberty and two hundred dollars and turned to slose in
Speaker 1: San Diego. So I was able to get four tattoos
Speaker 1: that day in three different shops. The first one I
Speaker 1: got with a little sailor girl on my forearm. So
Speaker 1: that was kind of the start of my collection. After
Speaker 1: four years in the Navy, I came out in nineteen
Speaker 1: nine and probably had thirty five tattoos maybe, so the
Speaker 1: collection had been growing. I was stationed in Texas, and
Speaker 1: then I was aboard ship into Hong Kong and the Philippines,
Speaker 1: and so I collected there. Chuck says the experience of
Speaker 1: getting a tattoo was very different back then. All the
Speaker 1: shops in San Diego then majority of more on Broadway,
Speaker 1: which is kind of like the main street in San Diego,
Speaker 1: and it's a sailor town, so the sidewalks are just
Speaker 1: full of sailors in uniform. They were literally lined up
Speaker 1: to get into the tattoo shop. And a lot of
Speaker 1: the shops were in kind of large bowlden alleys shaped buildings,
Speaker 1: you know, deep and skinny. It was noisy and loud,
Speaker 1: and all the tattooers were old men. They were all
Speaker 1: from the Second World War, in the Korean War, there
Speaker 1: were no young people tattooing, and there were no women tattooing. Stylistically,
Speaker 1: tattooing itself was also very different back then. There were
Speaker 1: all the specialties that we held now. There wasn't photo realism,
Speaker 1: there wasn't black and gray, there wasn't abstract, there wasn't watercolor.
Speaker 1: So tattoo was a tattoo was a tattoo. There was
Speaker 1: a kind of a set group of patterns that have
Speaker 1: been reproduced for, you know, hundreds of years, so there
Speaker 1: was kind of a uniformity to it. There was something
Speaker 1: familiar and comforting to those designs. There's a reason most
Speaker 1: of the tattoo clientele were originally sailors. They came to
Speaker 1: the Navy more so than the Army and the Air
Speaker 1: Force and such as that, just because the Navy was
Speaker 1: going to these exotic places. They were going into the
Speaker 1: South Pacific, where tattooing was was popular and was normal.
Speaker 1: Whenever you travel, for me, certainly, I always want to
Speaker 1: bring back some souvenir of that travel, and so sailors
Speaker 1: board ship, you don't have a lot of room, so
Speaker 1: you can't bring back anything of any kind of physical size.
Speaker 1: So those tattoos worked as souvenirs. They could bring those
Speaker 1: back and they would have them, and they could tell
Speaker 1: the story about getting those, and so it was. It
Speaker 1: was a souvenir that you could carry with you. Chuck's
Speaker 1: path to professional tattooing after leaving the Navy was unique.
Speaker 1: I actually came to tattooing later than most people. Most people,
Speaker 1: if they had had all that interest when they were young,
Speaker 1: they would have ended up hand poking their friends. That
Speaker 1: would have been the beginning of their tattoo career. But
Speaker 1: I took a different path. I ended up deciding out
Speaker 1: of the Navy. I had the g I Bill for
Speaker 1: four years. They gave me free education, so I decided
Speaker 1: to use that. And I decided I wanted to build
Speaker 1: custom bicycles. So I went to a welding school in
Speaker 1: North Carolina and learned to weld um. I worked in
Speaker 1: bicycle shops to get my mechanic skills up, and then
Speaker 1: I traveled to California to try to get a job
Speaker 1: with a frame builder there named Albert Eisenrout. So I
Speaker 1: was pursuing that, I thought, Okay, I'm going to be
Speaker 1: a bicycle frame builder. That's my lot in life. And
Speaker 1: I was still getting tattooed through this whole period, collecting
Speaker 1: here and there as I traveled and owned my way
Speaker 1: from North Carolina to California. I had gone through Chicago
Speaker 1: and I had gotten tattooed thereby a fella in Cliff
Speaker 1: Raven who was a really up and coming tattooer. And
Speaker 1: when I was getting tattooed by him, I mentioned that
Speaker 1: I was on my way to California and he says, well,
Speaker 1: you know, when you get out to San Francisco, look
Speaker 1: up this guy named Ed Hardy if you want to
Speaker 1: get to tattoo. So I just kind of filed that
Speaker 1: away in my brain. So once I got settled, I
Speaker 1: actually started looking for Ed. So I got over to
Speaker 1: his shop in San Francisco, and as soon as I
Speaker 1: went in the shop, you just go, oh, man, this
Speaker 1: is this is something different. He had big Japanese style
Speaker 1: body pieces and full sleeve drawings and stuff. So I
Speaker 1: realized that this was the place to get all those
Speaker 1: random tattoos tied together into a set of sleeves. So
Speaker 1: I did an apprenticeship there. Unfortunately, there was a fire.
Speaker 1: The shock was destroyed. After actually even less than a
Speaker 1: year I was living in Berkeley. I just decided to
Speaker 1: open my own shop. I had my own ideas of
Speaker 1: what I wanted a shop to look like. In seventy nine,
Speaker 1: I opened that shop in Berkeley, and I kept anguishing
Speaker 1: over what am I going to call this place? Is
Speaker 1: it going to be Chuck's tattoo shop or I mean,
Speaker 1: I didn't I didn't know. And one day, I mean,
Speaker 1: I bicycled by this this store, the Pacific Film Archive,
Speaker 1: which is an amazing film mark I've there in Berkeley,
Speaker 1: and somehow that day that I rode by, that word
Speaker 1: archive just leaped off the side of the building into
Speaker 1: my face. So I said, at that moment, Okay, it's
Speaker 1: going to be the tattoo work. That's it. That's the one,
Speaker 1: the tattoo archive. The shop eventually became a literal tattoo archive.
Speaker 1: You know, with tattooing. It doesn't take a lot of
Speaker 1: space to do tattooing, you know too con tattoo and
Speaker 1: a tin by tin room, you know, and have a
Speaker 1: nice space. So I denoted most the building the space
Speaker 1: for historical stuff. I worked away there and vote newsletters
Speaker 1: and wrote for other newsletters and um would do slide shows,
Speaker 1: history slide shows at conventions and stuff like this, trying
Speaker 1: to keep those old time tattoos names alive. The reason
Speaker 1: we have such a clear view of what's going on
Speaker 1: is because we're standing on their shoulders. Eventually, Chuck started
Speaker 1: to feel more inspired by his work with the archive
Speaker 1: than by his work in the shop. Tattooing was horrifying.
Speaker 1: There's there's no other way to describe it. For me,
Speaker 1: I never felt that I had it the thing, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. You you see some artists and
Speaker 1: they can draw anything in an instant, and you look
Speaker 1: at it and you go, it's perfect. I never had that.
Speaker 1: So I've labored over all that, and it was stressful
Speaker 1: preparing all that artwork in advance. It was easier to
Speaker 1: get it to where the customer was happy with it
Speaker 1: than it was to where I was happy with it.
Speaker 1: And my first tattoo was a little tiny ant I'll
Speaker 1: never forget on this guy's arm. I sweated, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, it was it was. It was horrible.
Speaker 1: So that improved a little bit, you know, in thirty
Speaker 1: or forty years, but they were still always really stressful.
Speaker 1: After the archive grew, Chuck devoted himself almost exclusively to
Speaker 1: his work as a historian. If you visit the Tattoo
Speaker 1: Archive website, you'll quickly see just how extensive his research is.
Speaker 1: I asked Chuck to take us back to the beginning,
Speaker 1: to the very origins of what we now know as tattoo.
Speaker 1: Tattooing started as body paint, and he goes back to
Speaker 1: the caveman. They would take dirt, red dirt, mix it
Speaker 1: with water, paint their bodies. They would take clay, mix
Speaker 1: that and paint their bodies. And this would be done
Speaker 1: in a ritual situation. Women would have their first child,
Speaker 1: when they could be buried, when men would go and
Speaker 1: have hunts and make their first kill, and all these
Speaker 1: kind of things that would be celebrations around this, and
Speaker 1: the bodies would be painted and there would be specific
Speaker 1: images and shapes that would be painted on the body
Speaker 1: to convey the specific ritual that they were celebrating. Once
Speaker 1: the caveman had fire, then they actually had a pigment
Speaker 1: that they could push into the skin where they actually
Speaker 1: could tattoo. And that's soit it's burnt down to a
Speaker 1: fine granular's form, and you mix that with water and
Speaker 1: you get a porcupine quill or a bird bone that
Speaker 1: had been shaped in the shape of a needle, and
Speaker 1: you could literally push that sit under the skin and
Speaker 1: then create a tattoo. As a specific example, there was
Speaker 1: one group of nomadic people who embraced tattoo before anyone else.
Speaker 1: If you really want to go back, you can go
Speaker 1: back to the Scythians. They were a very advanced tribe.
Speaker 1: They were doing metal work. They would do really large
Speaker 1: animal tattoos. They would be basically just outlines because they
Speaker 1: didn't have color pigment, and you know, they had crewed
Speaker 1: tools for doing the tattoos, so they were mainly outlines,
Speaker 1: but they covered a lot of their body. And then
Speaker 1: there are the Maori tribes in New Zealand. Many of
Speaker 1: today's popular tribal looking tattoos are directly inspired by the
Speaker 1: Maori people's work. Although the Maori's really only tattooed their
Speaker 1: face and their buttocks. That was pretty much where it
Speaker 1: was limited before Captain Cook and his crew got there
Speaker 1: in the seventeen hundreds into New Zealand. They actually had
Speaker 1: no written language, so their face tattoos would tell the
Speaker 1: story of that person life, their occupation, their tribe, their
Speaker 1: family connections, and all this kind of stuff would be
Speaker 1: told in their tattoos. If you go back and you
Speaker 1: start looking at ancient photographs of the Maoris, those tattoos
Speaker 1: were so ritualistic and so family oriented that when the
Speaker 1: chiefs would die, their heads would be removed and they
Speaker 1: would be smoked to where they would preserve them. The
Speaker 1: heads would go on display in the mattle inside their
Speaker 1: homes so that the children coming up could read the
Speaker 1: story of their ancestors. They had an amazing culture that way.
Speaker 1: If you travel in New Zealand, it's it's a tattoo wonderland.
Speaker 1: Every place you go, every gift shop, bookshop, museum. Tattoo
Speaker 1: culture is everywhere. The imagery it's amazing. Another region with
Speaker 1: a storied and complicated history of tattooing is Japan. Japanese
Speaker 1: tattooing is a lot like American tattooing in the fact
Speaker 1: that there's a hundred and fifty or two hundred images
Speaker 1: or something that's kind of been codified in their artwork,
Speaker 1: especially in their tattooing, and these tattooers do these images
Speaker 1: over and over and over. They rendered them in their
Speaker 1: fashion and stuff, and a lot of those images come
Speaker 1: from a specific woodblock series, Warrior Prints, that was done
Speaker 1: I guess probably in the seventeen hundreds, maybe maybe even
Speaker 1: a little earlier. But there was a series of artists
Speaker 1: that specialized in doing tattoo related woodblocks and woodblocks. They
Speaker 1: were like ephemera. They were printed own woodblocks and on paper.
Speaker 1: They weren't considered high art. They were like pop art,
Speaker 1: if you will, kind of pop culture. So those were fragile,
Speaker 1: and I mean a lot of them have survived and
Speaker 1: and sell for big money now, but they were a
Speaker 1: very kind of ephemeral kind of art form. But they
Speaker 1: influenced the tattooers, and I just bet some of the
Speaker 1: tattoos were probably woodblock artist as well. The Japanese, of course,
Speaker 1: completely look at tattoos in a different set of eyes,
Speaker 1: if you will. For an American, a small tattoo is
Speaker 1: an ant on your arm. For a Japanese tattoo fan,
Speaker 1: a half sleeve is a start. They took the palette
Speaker 1: and just enlarged it to an extreme degree, from wrist
Speaker 1: to neck two ankles. With the Japanese, they've definitely advanced it,
Speaker 1: and I think the Japanese tattoos are still on the
Speaker 1: forefront of spectacular bodywork politically and socially. However, Japan was
Speaker 1: very slow to embrace tattoos. Tattooing in Japan was looked
Speaker 1: at as an outsider art. Today it is connected with
Speaker 1: the yakaza, which is Japanese mafia, and I think that
Speaker 1: has hindered tattooing advancing in Japan. At one time, you
Speaker 1: could literally be in Japan and walked by a tattoo
Speaker 1: shop for years and never even know it was there.
Speaker 1: There was no signage. You had to have introductions to
Speaker 1: even get through the door of the tattoo shop. They
Speaker 1: labored in obscurity in a way that has changed now
Speaker 1: there are street shops in Japan, very often American looking
Speaker 1: street shops with flashy neon and strobe lights. The Japanese
Speaker 1: had kind of a mixed feeling about tattoos. They had
Speaker 1: advanced it to a high degree and was respected worldwide,
Speaker 1: but the straight Japanese uh they saw it as bad.
Speaker 1: They saw it as gangster. You can only imagine where
Speaker 1: it would gone if it had been more accepted, if
Speaker 1: that had been something that would have been less underground
Speaker 1: and less negative, how far would they have gone Most
Speaker 1: historians will tell you that tattoo made its way to
Speaker 1: North America from Europe, although as Chuck points out, that's
Speaker 1: actually false. All the native tribes in North America, long
Speaker 1: before the white men ever set foot on North America,
Speaker 1: all had some form of body decoration. They had progressed
Speaker 1: that where that was, that was normal. They were already
Speaker 1: doing puncture tattooing by the time the white man got here.
Speaker 1: But for professional tattooing, it was actually it came from England.
Speaker 1: In Germany. The early shops from the undreds and they
Speaker 1: were initially in New York because that's where the immigrants
Speaker 1: came in. They just got off the boat and went
Speaker 1: to the bery and found the store front and set
Speaker 1: up shop, and for probably a hundred years that continued
Speaker 1: in that fashion. Tattooing was mainly isolated to the coast
Speaker 1: where the ports were, where the navy was, and then
Speaker 1: as America built more military bases in the middle of
Speaker 1: the country, tattoos began to congregate around them. Generally, if
Speaker 1: there was tattooing in the middle of the country, in
Speaker 1: the middle of North America, it was around a military
Speaker 1: base because that was your bread and butter was tattooing
Speaker 1: the military. You would get a few civilian clients, but
Speaker 1: not enough to pay the rent. You stayed alive from
Speaker 1: pay day to pay day, and sometimes you would stay
Speaker 1: open three days straight if you had the staff to
Speaker 1: keep the shop going. Now it's to the point where
Speaker 1: if you're a young, aspiring tattooeder, if you've got ills,
Speaker 1: you don't even need to leave your little hometown. The
Speaker 1: world will beat a path to your door. Still, in
Speaker 1: those early days, tattoo thrived primarily on the coasts. It
Speaker 1: was nautical. It was around port towns. Those sailors you know,
Speaker 1: had traveled into the South Pacific. Captain Cook's crew came
Speaker 1: back from the South Pacific in New Zealand and with tattoos,
Speaker 1: so they brought them back. Once those islands in the
Speaker 1: South Pacific were charted with the latitude and longitude where
Speaker 1: people can actually find them again, you have to realize
Speaker 1: that these islands were like little specks in the middle
Speaker 1: of this massive body of water, so you could sail
Speaker 1: past it for hundreds of years and never even know
Speaker 1: that the island was there. But once Cook got that
Speaker 1: latitude and longitude in place, the next group of people
Speaker 1: to those islands were missionaries to begin with, and then explorers.
Speaker 1: Those explorers would find tattooed people and bring them back
Speaker 1: to England and back to America to show them for
Speaker 1: money to create the early side shows. That had a
Speaker 1: big impact, especially in North America and in England, because
Speaker 1: people would go to these circuces and side shows and
Speaker 1: they would see these tattoo attractions that had come from
Speaker 1: the South Pacific. Then they would go, that's cool. I think,
Speaker 1: what can I find one of those tattoo things? So
Speaker 1: I think that was kind of the beginning of that.
Speaker 1: It was around this time that the first tattoo machines
Speaker 1: came around and they revolutionized the process. The electric machine
Speaker 1: was invented by a fellow named Samuel O'Reilly mid to
Speaker 1: late eight hundreds, and he was inspired by Thomas Edison.
Speaker 1: An invention that Edison had called the stencil pen, which
Speaker 1: was a office tool for duplicating letters. And literally it
Speaker 1: was a pen type machine that was had an electric
Speaker 1: motor and a vibrating needle and you would take your
Speaker 1: original copy of your letter that you needed to duplicate
Speaker 1: and put it on a little phone pad and then
Speaker 1: you would ride over that the needle would puncture holes
Speaker 1: into the paper. Then you would take that and put
Speaker 1: it on a clean sheet and then take an inked
Speaker 1: roller roll over that. The ink would absorb through the
Speaker 1: holes and it would give you effects simile of the document.
Speaker 1: Of course, this is pre typewriter, so this is like
Speaker 1: early office technology. It was eclipsed within a year or
Speaker 1: so because the typewriter came O'Reilly was a Irish immigrant
Speaker 1: that came to America in the eighteen hundred. You saw
Speaker 1: the Edison stencil pen and goes I could tattoo with that.
Speaker 1: The machine evolved along and if you were a tattoo
Speaker 1: in the thirties forties, you almost had to be a
Speaker 1: mechanic because you had to maintain that equipment. Sometimes the
Speaker 1: tours had a serious mechanical skills, and so they would
Speaker 1: just start building their own machines that have them cast
Speaker 1: and they would wrap the coils and the machine was
Speaker 1: a kind of a constant evolution. Although you look at
Speaker 1: the tattoo machine a coil machine, and they all kind
Speaker 1: of looked the same, but there's subtleties inside that design.
Speaker 1: My analogy is the caveman invented the wheel and it's
Speaker 1: still round, so the twin coil machines still looks the same,
Speaker 1: but there's it's gotten more sophisticated, if you will. And
Speaker 1: many of these tattoos that had those mechanical skills actually
Speaker 1: became tattoo suppliers. They would go into a business, and
Speaker 1: sometimes the supply business would begin to overshadow their tattoo business.
Speaker 1: So this became a whole industry in itself. As Chuck
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, American tattoo design became codified into a handful
Speaker 1: of simple, repeatable images. I asked him to explain, with
Speaker 1: that traditional tattoo design, it looks like it's a design
Speaker 1: with a solid black outline. There's enough black shading in
Speaker 1: it to make it hold up thirty years from now
Speaker 1: when all the colored dims, and then it's colored with
Speaker 1: probably three or four basic colors, black, red, green, maybe
Speaker 1: a little brown or yellow. To my eye, that is
Speaker 1: a kind of a traditional tattoo design. Obviously, the imagery
Speaker 1: can be wild and crazy, doesn't have to be an
Speaker 1: anchor or sailor girl. But it's the way it's it's
Speaker 1: rendered it kind of makes it a traditional tattoo design.
Speaker 1: Then that design involves with the emersions of one of
Speaker 1: the most popular artists and styles Sailor Jerry. Sailor Jerry
Speaker 1: was a Honolulu tattooer that actually got his start in Chicago,
Speaker 1: moved to Honolulu and tattoo. They're kind of off and on.
Speaker 1: He kind of took a couple of break because and
Speaker 1: came back in the sixties as almost kind of a
Speaker 1: reinvented man and created this amazing volume of work because
Speaker 1: he sat there in Honolulu between North America, which had
Speaker 1: in the forties, fifties, sixties had a wealth of amazing
Speaker 1: tattooers working in North America in Japan. He took those
Speaker 1: two influences and blended them in a way that it
Speaker 1: hadn't been done before. It was a good water colorist,
Speaker 1: so he was able to take those images that we
Speaker 1: had seen, those codified images and reinvent them, and it
Speaker 1: was extremely attractive. It was kind of the classic folk
Speaker 1: art style of tattooing. There was another style that developed
Speaker 1: around the same time as Sailor Jerry, one that was
Speaker 1: less commercially popular, but equally provocative and important, and that
Speaker 1: is prison tattooing. You have a group of men or
Speaker 1: women locked up, maybe they don't look at it as
Speaker 1: a souvenir of their time in prison, but it certainly
Speaker 1: is a mark of their time in prison that they
Speaker 1: want to have. Sometimes you're actually almost required to have it.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to choose sides in there, and each
Speaker 1: side is going to have their markings and their logos
Speaker 1: and their wording and their lettering, and that associates you
Speaker 1: with that side. Not that far removed how the Marri's were.
Speaker 1: All the parallels are sometimes mind boggling actually how it works. Obviously,
Speaker 1: they didn't have access in prisons to needles. I mean
Speaker 1: maybe they did sewing needles, but you know those those
Speaker 1: were probably controlled once the guards found out that they
Speaker 1: were tattooing with the sewing needles, then that they were issued.
Speaker 1: You know, they didn't have pigment. They did have once
Speaker 1: again came back to the caveman burning pages of a
Speaker 1: book together. Sit They had all the makings, and you know,
Speaker 1: sadly a lot of tattooers were screwing up and ended
Speaker 1: up in jail. So they had people that knew what
Speaker 1: they were doing. It's impossible to say, oh, well, this
Speaker 1: guy in this prison got the first prison tattoo on
Speaker 1: this date. I mean it's it's not possible to date that,
Speaker 1: but it's certainly evolved into a very high art form.
Speaker 1: Much like once again the Japanese. Here it is suppressed
Speaker 1: as seriously as it could possibly be oppressed, but the
Speaker 1: desire to have it is overwhelming the oppression. I can remember,
Speaker 1: if you saw somebody on the street in the seventies
Speaker 1: with all this black and gray tattooing, nine times out
Speaker 1: of ten they had gotten that in prison. Today, obviously
Speaker 1: that's certainly not the case anymore. Now it's become a genre.
Speaker 1: It's got its whole world, it's got its own series
Speaker 1: of tattoos, it's got its own series of pigments, which
Speaker 1: like almost a separate branch of tattooing. Because of its
Speaker 1: association with prison and many other factors, the perception around
Speaker 1: tattoos in America for most of the twentieth century was
Speaker 1: less than warm. The old analogy was sailor's prisoners and
Speaker 1: loose women, that's who got tattooed. They were just looked
Speaker 1: at as as an outcast and suspicious, not good, not favorable.
Speaker 1: Tattoo shops were isolated into adult entertainment sections of town,
Speaker 1: where they had to be next to the titty boy,
Speaker 1: you know, and it was negative, you were a troublemaker.
Speaker 1: Police kept records of certain designs that were gang related,
Speaker 1: so that if they arrested somebody and they had this
Speaker 1: image on them, then they can make the connection of
Speaker 1: you know, it's like it's just all that's just piled
Speaker 1: up and piled up and piled up. It was not good,
Speaker 1: you know. I think the connection there in North America
Speaker 1: is religion. The Bible does not have the word tattoo
Speaker 1: in it, but it does talk about marking the body.
Speaker 1: I believe that that has stymied the public acceptance of
Speaker 1: tattooing for ever and ever. Even today it still doesn't.
Speaker 1: But as we all know, you can go into Starbucks
Speaker 1: now and you're barre stick and they have a tattooed neck.
Speaker 1: It's like, no matter how hard you push it down,
Speaker 1: that's still gonna rise up. That negativity started to diminish
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies and eighties once pop culture finally
Speaker 1: embraced tattoos. Some of means concerts and the major bands
Speaker 1: are on the road. Alice Cooper doing three It's at
Speaker 1: Chicago's Uptown Theater at the fifth, sixth and seventh. Music
Speaker 1: industry sources are also talking about the Rolling Stones tour.
Speaker 1: Yes it is happening, although Atlantic or The Stones have
Speaker 1: not confirmed it. Tremendous impact on the popularity. The current
Speaker 1: popularity of tattooing was MTV came along in two man.
Speaker 1: I can remember watching MTV and going, jeez, man, look
Speaker 1: at all these tattooed people. Look at these people coming
Speaker 1: into our living room. They weren't gangsters or robbers, or
Speaker 1: prisoners or murderers. TV is virtualistic in this country. You know,
Speaker 1: if it's on TV, it's real, especially then. It was
Speaker 1: maybe less so now, but that was the real world.
Speaker 1: Then led Zeppelin video would be shown every forty eight minutes,
Speaker 1: whether it needed to be enough, So you just start
Speaker 1: putting that into people's face. It's just going to begin
Speaker 1: to wear down those prejudice. And then along with that
Speaker 1: came tattoo conventions. I mean they started in seventies. Six
Speaker 1: people would show up, and everybody was amazing that there
Speaker 1: weren't more fist fights between the tattooers. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like it was still very underground. Getting a hotel to
Speaker 1: even allow us to have a tattoo convention was like, oh,
Speaker 1: my god, the liability insurance that you had to pay
Speaker 1: to even get a convention into those hotels. And then
Speaker 1: the tattoo magazines came. It was kind of like, almost
Speaker 1: like a perfect storm. It had been building through the
Speaker 1: sixties and the seventies, and so that just accumulated in
Speaker 1: the eighties and boom, here we are. We fear things
Speaker 1: we don't understand, and once we understand something, it takes
Speaker 1: some of that fear away. So I think that that's
Speaker 1: a classic example of what happened with the tattoo world.
Speaker 1: It became less fearful to people, and MTV, the conventions
Speaker 1: and the magazines and all that helped relieve that angst,
Speaker 1: if you will ye. Since the eighties, tattooing has blown up.
Speaker 1: Most major cities now have dozens of tattoo shops, and
Speaker 1: even small towns are sure to have at least a few.
Speaker 1: And along with that increased popularity came new styles, new ideas,
Speaker 1: and a wider palette of possibilities. Tattooing is certainly diversified.
Speaker 1: I mean, back when I started getting tattooed, a tattoo
Speaker 1: design was a tattoo design. It didn't have all that's
Speaker 1: kind of specialty name connected with it. Nowadays, there's a
Speaker 1: plethora of unique tattoo styles to pick from. This water color,
Speaker 1: the super realism, this black and gray, bio mechanical, there's
Speaker 1: more than I could even name off the top of
Speaker 1: my head. I find that I like them. I never
Speaker 1: were able to execute any of those. I was a
Speaker 1: very traditional tattoo so they were outside of my skill set,
Speaker 1: and I appreciate the skill that these tattoos do have.
Speaker 1: But it seems like every day there's a new term
Speaker 1: for another style of tattooing. And I think in the
Speaker 1: long run, it opens the art form to more people
Speaker 1: because traditional tattoos, which I love and there close to
Speaker 1: my heart or not for everybody. Yeah, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just that I faced that fact. That's not a problem.
Speaker 1: What it ends up doing, too is drawing interesting people,
Speaker 1: really talented people into the tattoo world that maybe would
Speaker 1: have never thought about that, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: That was like too weird, you know, tattooing somebody's skin.
Speaker 1: But they realized that their style and their technique actually
Speaker 1: can apply. I guess in the long run that's good.
Speaker 1: As with any sort of art media or fashion trend,
Speaker 1: there are pros and cons to the increased popularity. The
Speaker 1: good thing is that that draws more people in. People
Speaker 1: got to have more choices of what they do where
Speaker 1: they're able to express that inner feeling that they're wanting
Speaker 1: to put onto their skin. The bad thing is that
Speaker 1: people are drawn into it for all the wrong reasons,
Speaker 1: just to make money, be cool, be the hip cat
Speaker 1: you know. Chuck says that back in the day, the
Speaker 1: intentions of an aspiring tattoo artist were more pure. If
Speaker 1: you go back to the twenties, thirties, forties and you
Speaker 1: were a tattoo artist, you had to have a day job.
Speaker 1: There wasn't enough money in tattooing to support you and
Speaker 1: your family. Many of these tattooers were what I call
Speaker 1: blue collar tattoos. They get tattooed for forty or fifty
Speaker 1: years and have a day job that would bring them
Speaker 1: a salary every week, and um they could have paid
Speaker 1: their mortgage, and they tattooed evenings and weekends. Those blue
Speaker 1: collar guys. I love those the tattoos because they felt
Speaker 1: that they were there doing it because they did love it,
Speaker 1: not because they could make it a living in There's
Speaker 1: a real difference in mentality there that I kind of like.
Speaker 1: Chuck also wonders if tattooing has gotten too popular. I
Speaker 1: wish we could go back the weird tattoos were kind
Speaker 1: of taboo. I actually liked it a little better when
Speaker 1: tattoos were a little more outsider art. Any Time something
Speaker 1: becomes popular, it has a tendency to get overexposed, or
Speaker 1: it just becomes popular and it kind of loses some
Speaker 1: of its magic, if you will. I know a lot
Speaker 1: of people that were big proponents of promoting really good
Speaker 1: tattooing in the seventies and eighties sometimes now look back
Speaker 1: and go, come, you know, maybe we created a monster here.
Speaker 1: There are mixed feelings inside the tattoo business about that,
Speaker 1: and usually that comes from buddy that has enough experience
Speaker 1: to know what it was like before. I asked my
Speaker 1: tattoo guy Josh what he thought about the whole traditional
Speaker 1: versus new debate, and also whether his style has changed
Speaker 1: or evolved over the years. I've always kind of liked
Speaker 1: the roots of things, like more traditional things, so probably
Speaker 1: it hasn't changed a lot other than getting way more
Speaker 1: into you know, Japanese tattoo and a larger scale. But
Speaker 1: definitely like the mindset of like kind of more simple
Speaker 1: flat images, like things that look like it looked like
Speaker 1: they were meant to be tattooed. Like. That's always kind
Speaker 1: of I've always sort of had that mindset, but definitely
Speaker 1: have evolved more into doing large scale thinking about where
Speaker 1: it sits on the whole body instead of you know,
Speaker 1: the American emblematic patch catch patching. Today it's easier than
Speaker 1: ever to become a tattoo artist. I asked Chuck what
Speaker 1: the usual path for an aspiring tattoo looks like. If
Speaker 1: you really want to be what I think of as
Speaker 1: a professional tattoour, you need some training, some background, if
Speaker 1: nothing else, just to teach you the level of respect
Speaker 1: that you should be exhibiting for your art and for
Speaker 1: the tattoo art in itself and for your customers. Now,
Speaker 1: how long that training should be, That depends on the person.
Speaker 1: You know. If you can be a sponge, you could
Speaker 1: learn all of that in a month. Traditionally, tattooed apprenticeships
Speaker 1: were thought of as two years, and to open your
Speaker 1: own shop straight out of an apprenticeship is sometimes fool hardy,
Speaker 1: but it certainly happens. You gotta pay the utility bills.
Speaker 1: You gotta find the space, you gotta get the license
Speaker 1: if the city has you know what I mean. So
Speaker 1: there's these formalities that you kind of have to go through.
Speaker 1: Then you've got to build the shop, you know. I
Speaker 1: mean obviously some people put hundreds of thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: in their shops. Some people work out of a trunk
Speaker 1: set in the corner. So it's like, it depends on
Speaker 1: how you want to present yourself. There's no set formula
Speaker 1: for that. Back in the seventies when the tattoo Convention started,
Speaker 1: tattoos would not have shops. They were on the road tattooing.
Speaker 1: That's how they would stay alive and and do that.
Speaker 1: You don't need a lot of sophisticated equipment and stuff
Speaker 1: to do great tattooing. It's a very uh minimal equipment operation.
Speaker 1: While getting tattooed, I asked Josh about his basic setup.
Speaker 1: He confirmed the general simplicity of it and explain to
Speaker 1: me how the process typically works. Yes, basically, U two
Speaker 1: needle machine power supply. You have a clip chord then
Speaker 1: provides power to the machine from the power supply and
Speaker 1: then foot switch then turns it off and on. Um,
Speaker 1: So there's no like trigger on the thing. So a
Speaker 1: lot a lot of guys have just a switch that
Speaker 1: or it'll either turn it on or off. So if
Speaker 1: either constantly going. But I just don't like to feel
Speaker 1: if it constantly going, I feel like it's running away
Speaker 1: from me. Especially if you're like doing something like cleaning
Speaker 1: off the needle a little bit or something. You don't
Speaker 1: like that thing going and going and going. Don't. But yeah,
Speaker 1: usually foot switch clicking it on on you and then
Speaker 1: they get the ink. You have it kind of like white,
Speaker 1: like dip it like a quill or something, right, exactly
Speaker 1: like a quiltin like there's nothing making the ink stay
Speaker 1: in there or you know what I mean. There's no
Speaker 1: apparatus like sucking up ink or or disperse the ink.
Speaker 1: It's just like you're dipping it in the in the well,
Speaker 1: just like a quilton. And then it's just your poking
Speaker 1: holes in the skin and gravity is letting the ink
Speaker 1: drip down into the holes. You know. It's that It's
Speaker 1: that simple. There's nothing like pushing it in the area. Things,
Speaker 1: just the needle moving up and down. Chuck doesn't tattoo
Speaker 1: as much as he used to, but the tattoo Archive
Speaker 1: is bigger than ever. Well, you know, I could like
Speaker 1: paper posters, postcards, photographs, business cards, catalogs, flash sheets. If
Speaker 1: it's on paper, I like it. I think if I
Speaker 1: had my collection to start over again, could be exclusively
Speaker 1: business cards. I think that business cards give us the
Speaker 1: biggest indication of that person's sense of humor, their professionalism,
Speaker 1: their spelling abilities, and their artistic ability, more so than
Speaker 1: any other single item that's around the tattoo world. I
Speaker 1: think the business cards are fascinating and and they're easy
Speaker 1: to store. First of all, they may have a locator
Speaker 1: next to the Greyhound bus station. They will give you
Speaker 1: an indication of how many designs. Oh, we have a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand tattoo designs to choose from. We work in
Speaker 1: fourteen colors, we use English needles. The card just kind
Speaker 1: of spiels out what the person was saying, if he
Speaker 1: was describing his business to you, and it's all there
Speaker 1: on that three and a half by two inch little
Speaker 1: piece of paper. And then then sometimes on the back
Speaker 1: there's a cartoon that's clever. They're just full of information.
Speaker 1: Throughout the archive you'll find a vast collection of tattoo styles,
Speaker 1: spanning across different time periods and distant parts of the globe.
Speaker 1: I asked Chuck what he thinks is the common link
Speaker 1: between all these tattoo traditions. Tattoo pigment under the skin,
Speaker 1: that is the connector for all of it, regardless of
Speaker 1: what they call it, what color it is, what color
Speaker 1: the skin is, how well it's done, that is the
Speaker 1: tying end point. And with that is the idea that
Speaker 1: the person wants to wear this, They want to have
Speaker 1: this image on them for the world to see. And
Speaker 1: that's the connector. It's elementary. It goes back to the
Speaker 1: whole d n a thing of why did these people
Speaker 1: come in and say I need this tattoo? What is that?
Speaker 1: What is that drive? And that drive, obviously is is
Speaker 1: varied as the people walking into the shop. I believe
Speaker 1: that's the link. That is the physical idea of wearing
Speaker 1: a tattoo and facing what you might not understand as
Speaker 1: far as pain, healing, repercussions from your family. What's your
Speaker 1: mother going to think? Being willing to face that and
Speaker 1: go Okay, I want this mark. This mark is important.
Speaker 1: Those Marie tattoos, their whole life story was told on
Speaker 1: their face. If you could look at your tattoos and
Speaker 1: knew what the meanings of them were to you, those
Speaker 1: tattoos would tell the story of your life. We're all
Speaker 1: the same, We're still all the same. No no matter
Speaker 1: how sophisticated we dress ourselves, or what clever haircut we've got,
Speaker 1: or what cute accent we have, Well, we're all in
Speaker 1: this boat together. Yeah, Yeah life. This episode of Ephemeral
Speaker 1: was written and assembled by Trevor Young and produced with
Speaker 1: Max and Alex Williams. Chuck Eldridge is the founder of
Speaker 1: the Tattoo Archive, which you can bruise on tattoo archive
Speaker 1: dot com. And special thanks to Josh May, the tattoo
Speaker 1: artist we recorded working on Trevor's arm. You can find
Speaker 1: Josh and his work on Instagram at j m a
Speaker 1: y underscore a t L. If you'd like to share,
Speaker 1: we'd love to see your tattoos and hear the stories
Speaker 1: behind them. Find us online at Ephemeral dot show from
Speaker 1: our podcast through my Heart Radio, visit the i heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.