While he was there, his tattooer, a guy named Phil Sparrow, showed him a book that changed the course of his life. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a degree in printmaking in 1967 and was offered a scholarship to continue his studies at Yale. It was during the explosion of interest in tattooing in the 1960s and '70s that a guy named Ed Hardy popped onto the scene. American tattoo culture is ripe for change Ed Hardy at a tattoo convention in Sacramento circa 1980. Janis Joplin famously showed off her tattoo on The Tonight Show, done by San Francisco tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle. In the Bay Area, women were challenging the beauty norms of the day as part of the women's liberation movement. People were still getting American traditional flash tattoos, but now they were associated with countercultural movements. "In the decades after World War II, and particularly after 1960, we see a spread of tattoo culture throughout popular culture in the U.S.," said Nina Jablonski, a professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University and author of the book " Skin: A Natural History." "It becomes not necessarily legitimized, but much more popular." Counterculture movements make tattoos mainstream Society was poised for some major social changes. When the war finally ended, Americans didn't want to return to the way things had been. They would have seen tattoos on people in Japan and the Pacific Islands, and they may even have gotten more tattoos while deployed. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)Īnd during the war, American soldiers came in contact with people from all over the world. Tattoo artist Kyra Monterrosa points to a sheet of flash tattoos she designed for a 415 Day event at Rebel Gallery in San Francisco's Bayview neighborhood. Many stopped into local tattoo shops and inked familiar flash tattoos on themselves as reminders of home. Over time this visual vocabulary became common enough that tattoo artists would display the most popular designs in their shops, called "flash."ĭuring World War II, soldiers poured into San Francisco before shipping out to the Pacific theater. Second, American traditional tattoos have easily identifiable designs and motifs like hearts, skulls, anchors, roses and other kinds of flowers. Primary colors stay clear and eye-catching over a person’s whole lifetime. It has two recognizable design features: First, the tattoos use bright, saturated colors like yellow, red and green, with black for shading. This style of tattooing grew into what is now known as American traditional. The swallow, for example, meant that a sailor had traveled over 5,000 nautical miles. Or, they'd get designs that over time came to symbolize specific things. Soldiers would get the names of people they wanted to remember inked on their skin - mothers, daughters and girlfriends. In the early 20th century, tattoos were still largely seen on people outside of mainstream society: soldiers, sailors and some circus performers who showed off their heavily tattooed bodies to enthralled crowds.Īnd because tattoos were so connected to the military, the designs were often nostalgic. Thomas Edison's patent for the electric pen. The new machine had a motor that drove the needle up and down, increasing the perforation rate to 50 times per second and revolutionizing tattooing. It modified Thomas Edison's electric pen, replacing the pen with a needle that stored ink.īefore O’Reilly's machine, tattoo artists punctured the skin two to three times per second. In 1891, tattooer and inventor Samuel O'Reilly received a patent for the first electric tattoo machine. Among Americans of European decent, tattoos were strongly associated with the military, starting around the time of the Civil War.
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