Tattoo

poignant and permanent way to express oneself. To some extent, that fact has been true since the beginning of humankind. From then to now, tattoos have always told a story, sometimes the story of one person, other times the story of an entire people. Today, a thermal producer, Trevor Young takes us through the rich history of tattoos, starting by getting a tattoo himself. All right, all right, here we go. I'm sitting at Southern Star Tattoo in Atlanta. My friend,

entrusted tattoo confidant Josh May picks up shifts here. Not bad. He's been tattooing for decades and his work is incredible. He's now finished thirteen tattoos on me over the course of three years. Today I'm getting another one on my right arm, a simple black symbol connected to a band I like personally. I've always found the experience of getting a tattoo to be exhilarating in the moment and intrinsically

fulfilling in the long term, more spiritual sense. In short, my tattoos have become a primary source of my outward identity away for me to tell my story. People committed the shop in the say I need this tattoo. It's not that I want this tattoo or I'm going to get this tattoo. I need this tattoo, So there's something happening there. My name is Chuck Eldridge. I'm the co owner and operator of the Tattoo Archive, located in Winston Salem,

North Carolina. The Tattoo Archive is all about discovering connections across different times and cultures as it relates to tattoo. Chuck has devoted his life to this research, and what he's found is that tattoo is a time honored and universally beloved tradition. Tattooing it was practiced around the world. I don't think there's a tribe or a group of people anywhere in the world that doesn't engage in some

form of body decoration. Now sometimes it's still body painting in many of those esprecially some African tribes, and of course they get into scarification as well. But it seems like it's something in our nature. I don't know, it's almost like it's in the d n A of our body to mark our body, to have that group identity. For Chuck, it's always been about community, and in his case, that tattoo community came around very early on in life.

I was born in a little cotton mill town called Elkin, North Carolina, and my father, my brother, my uncle's all had service related tattoos, so I grew up seeing them my whole childhood, and UM really liked them. I love the look of them. Um. I can remember getting my uncle's to tell me the stories about how they got them, and at the age of eight I decided I wanted tattoos. And then it was a decade when I was in the Navy at eighteen that I was able to get

my first tattoo. I did boot camp in San Diego, California, and after team weeks, they gave us twelve hours of liberty and two hundred dollars and turned to slose in San Diego. So I was able to get four tattoos that day in three different shops. The first one I got with a little sailor girl on my forearm. So that was kind of the start of my collection. After four years in the Navy, I came out in nineteen nine and probably had thirty five tattoos maybe, so the

collection had been growing. I was stationed in Texas, and then I was aboard ship into Hong Kong and the Philippines, and so I collected there. Chuck says the experience of getting a tattoo was very different back then. All the shops in San Diego then majority of more on Broadway, which is kind of like the main street in San Diego, and it's a sailor town, so the sidewalks are just full of sailors in uniform. They were literally lined up

to get into the tattoo shop. And a lot of the shops were in kind of large bowlden alleys shaped buildings, you know, deep and skinny. It was noisy and loud, and all the tattooers were old men. They were all from the Second World War, in the Korean War, there were no young people tattooing, and there were no women tattooing. Stylistically, tattooing itself was also very different back then. There were

all the specialties that we held now. There wasn't photo realism, there wasn't black and gray, there wasn't abstract, there wasn't watercolor. So tattoo was a tattoo was a tattoo. There was a kind of a set group of patterns that have been reproduced for, you know, hundreds of years, so there was kind of a uniformity to it. There was something familiar and comforting to those designs. There's a reason most

of the tattoo clientele were originally sailors. They came to the Navy more so than the Army and the Air Force and such as that, just because the Navy was going to these exotic places. They were going into the South Pacific, where tattooing was was popular and was normal. Whenever you travel, for me, certainly, I always want to bring back some souvenir of that travel, and so sailors board ship, you don't have a lot of room, so you can't bring back anything of any kind of physical size.

So those tattoos worked as souvenirs. They could bring those back and they would have them, and they could tell the story about getting those, and so it was. It was a souvenir that you could carry with you. Chuck's path to professional tattooing after leaving the Navy was unique. I actually came to tattooing later than most people. Most people, if they had had all that interest when they were young, they would have ended up hand poking their friends. That

would have been the beginning of their tattoo career. But I took a different path. I ended up deciding out of the Navy. I had the g I Bill for four years. They gave me free education, so I decided to use that. And I decided I wanted to build custom bicycles. So I went to a welding school in North Carolina and learned to weld um. I worked in bicycle shops to get my mechanic skills up, and then I traveled to California to try to get a job

with a frame builder there named Albert Eisenrout. So I was pursuing that, I thought, Okay, I'm going to be a bicycle frame builder. That's my lot in life. And I was still getting tattooed through this whole period, collecting here and there as I traveled and owned my way from North Carolina to California. I had gone through Chicago and I had gotten tattooed thereby a fella in Cliff

Raven who was a really up and coming tattooer. And when I was getting tattooed by him, I mentioned that I was on my way to California and he says, well, you know, when you get out to San Francisco, look up this guy named Ed Hardy if you want to get to tattoo. So I just kind of filed that away in my brain. So once I got settled, I actually started looking for Ed. So I got over to his shop in San Francisco, and as soon as I went in the shop, you just go, oh, man, this

is this is something different. He had big Japanese style body pieces and full sleeve drawings and stuff. So I realized that this was the place to get all those random tattoos tied together into a set of sleeves. So I did an apprenticeship there. Unfortunately, there was a fire. The shock was destroyed. After actually even less than a year I was living in Berkeley. I just decided to open my own shop. I had my own ideas of

what I wanted a shop to look like. In seventy nine, I opened that shop in Berkeley, and I kept anguishing over what am I going to call this place? Is it going to be Chuck's tattoo shop or I mean, I didn't I didn't know. And one day, I mean, I bicycled by this this store, the Pacific Film Archive, which is an amazing film mark I've there in Berkeley, and somehow that day that I rode by, that word archive just leaped off the side of the building into my face. So I said, at that moment, Okay, it's

going to be the tattoo work. That's it. That's the one, the tattoo archive. The shop eventually became a literal tattoo archive. You know, with tattooing. It doesn't take a lot of space to do tattooing, you know too con tattoo and a tin by tin room, you know, and have a nice space. So I denoted most the building the space

for historical stuff. I worked away there and vote newsletters and wrote for other newsletters and um would do slide shows, history slide shows at conventions and stuff like this, trying to keep those old time tattoos names alive. The reason we have such a clear view of what's going on is because we're standing on their shoulders. Eventually, Chuck started to feel more inspired by his work with the archive than by his work in the shop. Tattooing was horrifying.

There's there's no other way to describe it. For me, I never felt that I had it the thing, you know what I mean. You you see some artists and they can draw anything in an instant, and you look at it and you go, it's perfect. I never had that. So I've labored over all that, and it was stressful preparing all that artwork in advance. It was easier to get it to where the customer was happy with it than it was to where I was happy with it. And my first tattoo was a little tiny ant I'll

never forget on this guy's arm. I sweated, you know what I mean, it was it was. It was horrible. So that improved a little bit, you know, in thirty or forty years, but they were still always really stressful. After the archive grew, Chuck devoted himself almost exclusively to his work as a historian. If you visit the Tattoo Archive website, you'll quickly see just how extensive his research is. I asked Chuck to take us back to the beginning, to the very origins of what we now know as tattoo.

Tattooing started as body paint, and he goes back to the caveman. They would take dirt, red dirt, mix it with water, paint their bodies. They would take clay, mix that and paint their bodies. And this would be done

in a ritual situation. Women would have their first child, when they could be buried, when men would go and have hunts and make their first kill, and all these kind of things that would be celebrations around this, and the bodies would be painted and there would be specific images and shapes that would be painted on the body to convey the specific ritual that they were celebrating. Once the caveman had fire, then they actually had a pigment that they could push into the skin where they actually

could tattoo. And that's soit it's burnt down to a fine granular's form, and you mix that with water and you get a porcupine quill or a bird bone that had been shaped in the shape of a needle, and you could literally push that sit under the skin and then create a tattoo. As a specific example, there was one group of nomadic people who embraced tattoo before anyone else. If you really want to go back, you can go back to the Scythians. They were a very advanced tribe.

They were doing metal work. They would do really large animal tattoos. They would be basically just outlines because they didn't have color pigment, and you know, they had crewed tools for doing the tattoos, so they were mainly outlines, but they covered a lot of their body. And then there are the Maori tribes in New Zealand. Many of today's popular tribal looking tattoos are directly inspired by the Maori people's work. Although the Maori's really only tattooed their

face and their buttocks. That was pretty much where it was limited before Captain Cook and his crew got there in the seventeen hundreds into New Zealand. They actually had no written language, so their face tattoos would tell the story of that person life, their occupation, their tribe, their family connections, and all this kind of stuff would be

told in their tattoos. If you go back and you start looking at ancient photographs of the Maoris, those tattoos were so ritualistic and so family oriented that when the chiefs would die, their heads would be removed and they would be smoked to where they would preserve them. The heads would go on display in the mattle inside their homes so that the children coming up could read the story of their ancestors. They had an amazing culture that way.

If you travel in New Zealand, it's it's a tattoo wonderland. Every place you go, every gift shop, bookshop, museum. Tattoo culture is everywhere. The imagery it's amazing. Another region with a storied and complicated history of tattooing is Japan. Japanese tattooing is a lot like American tattooing in the fact that there's a hundred and fifty or two hundred images or something that's kind of been codified in their artwork, especially in their tattooing, and these tattooers do these images

over and over and over. They rendered them in their fashion and stuff, and a lot of those images come from a specific woodblock series, Warrior Prints, that was done I guess probably in the seventeen hundreds, maybe maybe even a little earlier. But there was a series of artists that specialized in doing tattoo related woodblocks and woodblocks. They were like ephemera. They were printed own woodblocks and on paper. They weren't considered high art. They were like pop art,

if you will, kind of pop culture. So those were fragile, and I mean a lot of them have survived and and sell for big money now, but they were a very kind of ephemeral kind of art form. But they influenced the tattooers, and I just bet some of the tattoos were probably woodblock artist as well. The Japanese, of course, completely look at tattoos in a different set of eyes, if you will. For an American, a small tattoo is an ant on your arm. For a Japanese tattoo fan,

a half sleeve is a start. They took the palette and just enlarged it to an extreme degree, from wrist to neck two ankles. With the Japanese, they've definitely advanced it, and I think the Japanese tattoos are still on the forefront of spectacular bodywork politically and socially. However, Japan was very slow to embrace tattoos. Tattooing in Japan was looked at as an outsider art. Today it is connected with the yakaza, which is Japanese mafia, and I think that

has hindered tattooing advancing in Japan. At one time, you could literally be in Japan and walked by a tattoo shop for years and never even know it was there. There was no signage. You had to have introductions to even get through the door of the tattoo shop. They labored in obscurity in a way that has changed now there are street shops in Japan, very often American looking street shops with flashy neon and strobe lights. The Japanese

had kind of a mixed feeling about tattoos. They had advanced it to a high degree and was respected worldwide, but the straight Japanese uh they saw it as bad. They saw it as gangster. You can only imagine where it would gone if it had been more accepted, if that had been something that would have been less underground and less negative, how far would they have gone Most historians will tell you that tattoo made its way to North America from Europe, although as Chuck points out, that's

actually false. All the native tribes in North America, long before the white men ever set foot on North America, all had some form of body decoration. They had progressed that where that was, that was normal. They were already doing puncture tattooing by the time the white man got here. But for professional tattooing, it was actually it came from England. In Germany. The early shops from the undreds and they were initially in New York because that's where the immigrants

came in. They just got off the boat and went to the bery and found the store front and set up shop, and for probably a hundred years that continued in that fashion. Tattooing was mainly isolated to the coast where the ports were, where the navy was, and then as America built more military bases in the middle of

the country, tattoos began to congregate around them. Generally, if there was tattooing in the middle of the country, in the middle of North America, it was around a military base because that was your bread and butter was tattooing the military. You would get a few civilian clients, but not enough to pay the rent. You stayed alive from pay day to pay day, and sometimes you would stay open three days straight if you had the staff to

keep the shop going. Now it's to the point where if you're a young, aspiring tattooeder, if you've got ills, you don't even need to leave your little hometown. The world will beat a path to your door. Still, in those early days, tattoo thrived primarily on the coasts. It was nautical. It was around port towns. Those sailors you know, had traveled into the South Pacific. Captain Cook's crew came back from the South Pacific in New Zealand and with tattoos,

so they brought them back. Once those islands in the South Pacific were charted with the latitude and longitude where people can actually find them again, you have to realize that these islands were like little specks in the middle of this massive body of water, so you could sail past it for hundreds of years and never even know

that the island was there. But once Cook got that latitude and longitude in place, the next group of people to those islands were missionaries to begin with, and then explorers. Those explorers would find tattooed people and bring them back to England and back to America to show them for

money to create the early side shows. That had a big impact, especially in North America and in England, because people would go to these circuces and side shows and they would see these tattoo attractions that had come from the South Pacific. Then they would go, that's cool. I think, what can I find one of those tattoo things? So I think that was kind of the beginning of that. It was around this time that the first tattoo machines

came around and they revolutionized the process. The electric machine was invented by a fellow named Samuel O'Reilly mid to late eight hundreds, and he was inspired by Thomas Edison. An invention that Edison had called the stencil pen, which

was a office tool for duplicating letters. And literally it was a pen type machine that was had an electric motor and a vibrating needle and you would take your original copy of your letter that you needed to duplicate and put it on a little phone pad and then you would ride over that the needle would puncture holes into the paper. Then you would take that and put it on a clean sheet and then take an inked

roller roll over that. The ink would absorb through the holes and it would give you effects simile of the document. Of course, this is pre typewriter, so this is like early office technology. It was eclipsed within a year or so because the typewriter came O'Reilly was a Irish immigrant that came to America in the eighteen hundred. You saw the Edison stencil pen and goes I could tattoo with that. The machine evolved along and if you were a tattoo in the thirties forties, you almost had to be a

mechanic because you had to maintain that equipment. Sometimes the tours had a serious mechanical skills, and so they would just start building their own machines that have them cast and they would wrap the coils and the machine was a kind of a constant evolution. Although you look at the tattoo machine a coil machine, and they all kind of looked the same, but there's subtleties inside that design.

My analogy is the caveman invented the wheel and it's still round, so the twin coil machines still looks the same, but there's it's gotten more sophisticated, if you will. And many of these tattoos that had those mechanical skills actually became tattoo suppliers. They would go into a business, and sometimes the supply business would begin to overshadow their tattoo business.

So this became a whole industry in itself. As Chuck mentioned earlier, American tattoo design became codified into a handful of simple, repeatable images. I asked him to explain, with that traditional tattoo design, it looks like it's a design with a solid black outline. There's enough black shading in it to make it hold up thirty years from now when all the colored dims, and then it's colored with probably three or four basic colors, black, red, green, maybe

a little brown or yellow. To my eye, that is a kind of a traditional tattoo design. Obviously, the imagery can be wild and crazy, doesn't have to be an anchor or sailor girl. But it's the way it's it's rendered it kind of makes it a traditional tattoo design. Then that design involves with the emersions of one of the most popular artists and styles Sailor Jerry. Sailor Jerry was a Honolulu tattooer that actually got his start in Chicago, moved to Honolulu and tattoo. They're kind of off and on.

He kind of took a couple of break because and came back in the sixties as almost kind of a reinvented man and created this amazing volume of work because he sat there in Honolulu between North America, which had in the forties, fifties, sixties had a wealth of amazing tattooers working in North America in Japan. He took those two influences and blended them in a way that it

hadn't been done before. It was a good water colorist, so he was able to take those images that we had seen, those codified images and reinvent them, and it was extremely attractive. It was kind of the classic folk art style of tattooing. There was another style that developed around the same time as Sailor Jerry, one that was less commercially popular, but equally provocative and important, and that

is prison tattooing. You have a group of men or women locked up, maybe they don't look at it as a souvenir of their time in prison, but it certainly is a mark of their time in prison that they want to have. Sometimes you're actually almost required to have it. You're gonna have to choose sides in there, and each side is going to have their markings and their logos and their wording and their lettering, and that associates you with that side. Not that far removed how the Marri's were.

All the parallels are sometimes mind boggling actually how it works. Obviously, they didn't have access in prisons to needles. I mean maybe they did sewing needles, but you know those those were probably controlled once the guards found out that they were tattooing with the sewing needles, then that they were issued. You know, they didn't have pigment. They did have once again came back to the caveman burning pages of a

book together. Sit They had all the makings, and you know, sadly a lot of tattooers were screwing up and ended up in jail. So they had people that knew what they were doing. It's impossible to say, oh, well, this guy in this prison got the first prison tattoo on this date. I mean it's it's not possible to date that, but it's certainly evolved into a very high art form. Much like once again the Japanese. Here it is suppressed as seriously as it could possibly be oppressed, but the

desire to have it is overwhelming the oppression. I can remember, if you saw somebody on the street in the seventies with all this black and gray tattooing, nine times out of ten they had gotten that in prison. Today, obviously that's certainly not the case anymore. Now it's become a genre. It's got its whole world, it's got its own series of tattoos, it's got its own series of pigments, which

like almost a separate branch of tattooing. Because of its association with prison and many other factors, the perception around tattoos in America for most of the twentieth century was less than warm. The old analogy was sailor's prisoners and loose women, that's who got tattooed. They were just looked at as as an outcast and suspicious, not good, not favorable.

Tattoo shops were isolated into adult entertainment sections of town, where they had to be next to the titty boy, you know, and it was negative, you were a troublemaker. Police kept records of certain designs that were gang related, so that if they arrested somebody and they had this image on them, then they can make the connection of you know, it's like it's just all that's just piled up and piled up and piled up. It was not good, you know. I think the connection there in North America

is religion. The Bible does not have the word tattoo in it, but it does talk about marking the body. I believe that that has stymied the public acceptance of tattooing for ever and ever. Even today it still doesn't. But as we all know, you can go into Starbucks now and you're barre stick and they have a tattooed neck. It's like, no matter how hard you push it down, that's still gonna rise up. That negativity started to diminish in the nineteen seventies and eighties once pop culture finally

embraced tattoos. Some of means concerts and the major bands are on the road. Alice Cooper doing three It's at Chicago's Uptown Theater at the fifth, sixth and seventh. Music industry sources are also talking about the Rolling Stones tour. Yes it is happening, although Atlantic or The Stones have not confirmed it. Tremendous impact on the popularity. The current popularity of tattooing was MTV came along in two man. I can remember watching MTV and going, jeez, man, look

at all these tattooed people. Look at these people coming into our living room. They weren't gangsters or robbers, or prisoners or murderers. TV is virtualistic in this country. You know, if it's on TV, it's real, especially then. It was maybe less so now, but that was the real world. Then led Zeppelin video would be shown every forty eight minutes, whether it needed to be enough, So you just start putting that into people's face. It's just going to begin

to wear down those prejudice. And then along with that came tattoo conventions. I mean they started in seventies. Six people would show up, and everybody was amazing that there weren't more fist fights between the tattooers. You know, it's like it was still very underground. Getting a hotel to even allow us to have a tattoo convention was like, oh, my god, the liability insurance that you had to pay to even get a convention into those hotels. And then

the tattoo magazines came. It was kind of like, almost like a perfect storm. It had been building through the sixties and the seventies, and so that just accumulated in the eighties and boom, here we are. We fear things we don't understand, and once we understand something, it takes some of that fear away. So I think that that's a classic example of what happened with the tattoo world.

It became less fearful to people, and MTV, the conventions and the magazines and all that helped relieve that angst, if you will ye. Since the eighties, tattooing has blown up. Most major cities now have dozens of tattoo shops, and even small towns are sure to have at least a few. And along with that increased popularity came new styles, new ideas, and a wider palette of possibilities. Tattooing is certainly diversified. I mean, back when I started getting tattooed, a tattoo

design was a tattoo design. It didn't have all that's kind of specialty name connected with it. Nowadays, there's a plethora of unique tattoo styles to pick from. This water color, the super realism, this black and gray, bio mechanical, there's more than I could even name off the top of my head. I find that I like them. I never were able to execute any of those. I was a very traditional tattoo so they were outside of my skill set, and I appreciate the skill that these tattoos do have.

But it seems like every day there's a new term for another style of tattooing. And I think in the long run, it opens the art form to more people because traditional tattoos, which I love and there close to my heart or not for everybody. Yeah, I mean, it's just that I faced that fact. That's not a problem. What it ends up doing, too is drawing interesting people, really talented people into the tattoo world that maybe would have never thought about that, you know what I mean.

That was like too weird, you know, tattooing somebody's skin. But they realized that their style and their technique actually can apply. I guess in the long run that's good. As with any sort of art media or fashion trend, there are pros and cons to the increased popularity. The good thing is that that draws more people in. People got to have more choices of what they do where they're able to express that inner feeling that they're wanting

to put onto their skin. The bad thing is that people are drawn into it for all the wrong reasons, just to make money, be cool, be the hip cat you know. Chuck says that back in the day, the intentions of an aspiring tattoo artist were more pure. If you go back to the twenties, thirties, forties and you were a tattoo artist, you had to have a day job. There wasn't enough money in tattooing to support you and your family. Many of these tattooers were what I call

blue collar tattoos. They get tattooed for forty or fifty years and have a day job that would bring them a salary every week, and um they could have paid their mortgage, and they tattooed evenings and weekends. Those blue collar guys. I love those the tattoos because they felt that they were there doing it because they did love it, not because they could make it a living in There's a real difference in mentality there that I kind of like.

Chuck also wonders if tattooing has gotten too popular. I wish we could go back the weird tattoos were kind of taboo. I actually liked it a little better when tattoos were a little more outsider art. Any Time something becomes popular, it has a tendency to get overexposed, or it just becomes popular and it kind of loses some

of its magic, if you will. I know a lot of people that were big proponents of promoting really good tattooing in the seventies and eighties sometimes now look back and go, come, you know, maybe we created a monster here. There are mixed feelings inside the tattoo business about that, and usually that comes from buddy that has enough experience

to know what it was like before. I asked my tattoo guy Josh what he thought about the whole traditional versus new debate, and also whether his style has changed or evolved over the years. I've always kind of liked the roots of things, like more traditional things, so probably it hasn't changed a lot other than getting way more into you know, Japanese tattoo and a larger scale. But definitely like the mindset of like kind of more simple flat images, like things that look like it looked like

they were meant to be tattooed. Like. That's always kind of I've always sort of had that mindset, but definitely have evolved more into doing large scale thinking about where it sits on the whole body instead of you know, the American emblematic patch catch patching. Today it's easier than ever to become a tattoo artist. I asked Chuck what

the usual path for an aspiring tattoo looks like. If you really want to be what I think of as a professional tattoour, you need some training, some background, if nothing else, just to teach you the level of respect that you should be exhibiting for your art and for the tattoo art in itself and for your customers. Now, how long that training should be, That depends on the person. You know. If you can be a sponge, you could

learn all of that in a month. Traditionally, tattooed apprenticeships were thought of as two years, and to open your own shop straight out of an apprenticeship is sometimes fool hardy, but it certainly happens. You gotta pay the utility bills. You gotta find the space, you gotta get the license if the city has you know what I mean. So there's these formalities that you kind of have to go through.

Then you've got to build the shop, you know. I mean obviously some people put hundreds of thousands of dollars in their shops. Some people work out of a trunk set in the corner. So it's like, it depends on how you want to present yourself. There's no set formula for that. Back in the seventies when the tattoo Convention started, tattoos would not have shops. They were on the road tattooing. That's how they would stay alive and and do that.

You don't need a lot of sophisticated equipment and stuff to do great tattooing. It's a very uh minimal equipment operation. While getting tattooed, I asked Josh about his basic setup. He confirmed the general simplicity of it and explain to me how the process typically works. Yes, basically, U two needle machine power supply. You have a clip chord then provides power to the machine from the power supply and then foot switch then turns it off and on. Um,

So there's no like trigger on the thing. So a lot a lot of guys have just a switch that or it'll either turn it on or off. So if either constantly going. But I just don't like to feel if it constantly going, I feel like it's running away from me. Especially if you're like doing something like cleaning off the needle a little bit or something. You don't like that thing going and going and going. Don't. But yeah, usually foot switch clicking it on on you and then

they get the ink. You have it kind of like white, like dip it like a quill or something, right, exactly like a quiltin like there's nothing making the ink stay in there or you know what I mean. There's no apparatus like sucking up ink or or disperse the ink. It's just like you're dipping it in the in the well, just like a quilton. And then it's just your poking holes in the skin and gravity is letting the ink drip down into the holes. You know. It's that It's

that simple. There's nothing like pushing it in the area. Things, just the needle moving up and down. Chuck doesn't tattoo as much as he used to, but the tattoo Archive is bigger than ever. Well, you know, I could like paper posters, postcards, photographs, business cards, catalogs, flash sheets. If it's on paper, I like it. I think if I had my collection to start over again, could be exclusively

business cards. I think that business cards give us the biggest indication of that person's sense of humor, their professionalism, their spelling abilities, and their artistic ability, more so than any other single item that's around the tattoo world. I think the business cards are fascinating and and they're easy to store. First of all, they may have a locator next to the Greyhound bus station. They will give you an indication of how many designs. Oh, we have a

hundred thousand tattoo designs to choose from. We work in fourteen colors, we use English needles. The card just kind of spiels out what the person was saying, if he was describing his business to you, and it's all there on that three and a half by two inch little piece of paper. And then then sometimes on the back there's a cartoon that's clever. They're just full of information.

Throughout the archive you'll find a vast collection of tattoo styles, spanning across different time periods and distant parts of the globe. I asked Chuck what he thinks is the common link between all these tattoo traditions. Tattoo pigment under the skin, that is the connector for all of it, regardless of what they call it, what color it is, what color the skin is, how well it's done, that is the tying end point. And with that is the idea that the person wants to wear this, They want to have

this image on them for the world to see. And that's the connector. It's elementary. It goes back to the whole d n a thing of why did these people come in and say I need this tattoo? What is that? What is that drive? And that drive, obviously is is varied as the people walking into the shop. I believe that's the link. That is the physical idea of wearing a tattoo and facing what you might not understand as far as pain, healing, repercussions from your family. What's your

mother going to think? Being willing to face that and go Okay, I want this mark. This mark is important. Those Marie tattoos, their whole life story was told on their face. If you could look at your tattoos and knew what the meanings of them were to you, those tattoos would tell the story of your life. We're all the same, We're still all the same. No no matter how sophisticated we dress ourselves, or what clever haircut we've got, or what cute accent we have, Well, we're all in

this boat together. Yeah, Yeah life. This episode of Ephemeral was written and assembled by Trevor Young and produced with Max and Alex Williams. Chuck Eldridge is the founder of the Tattoo Archive, which you can bruise on tattoo archive dot com. And special thanks to Josh May, the tattoo artist we recorded working on Trevor's arm. You can find Josh and his work on Instagram at j m a y underscore a t L. If you'd like to share, we'd love to see your tattoos and hear the stories

behind them. Find us online at Ephemeral dot show from our podcast through my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.