How Do You Preserve Tattoo History When Skin And Memory Fail?

Its inaugural lineup was legendary enough to launch an entire era of American tattooing, but Tattoo City in San Francisco will soon officially die, closing its doors for good at the end of 2024. Situated on Lombard Street, the shop was relaunched by Don Ed Hardy in 1991 with three unknown artists who quickly became powerhouses in their own right. Within a few years, the roster of Hardy, Dan Higgs, Freddy Corbin, and Eddy Deutsche was churning out painted flash and inked flesh that transcended the barrier between the street shop—buzzy, loud, and known for churning out sailor tattoos and carnival barking—and the upscale craftsmanship and customized experience of studio work. Those men have long left Tattoo City: Corbin started a legendary Oakland shop (Temple Tattoo), Deutsche tattoos out of Chad Koeplinger’s Buddhist enclave in Nashville (Adventure Tattoo), and Higgs disappeared from the industry entirely (he was always more of a poet, anyway). If tattooing is iconoclasm, fruitful collaboration between iconoclasts often has a shelf life.

While the average tattooer is aware of the Hardy-Higgs-Corbin-Deutsche quartet as if they were Gospel authors, the only name in the lineup that made the leap from subculture to pop culture was Hardy’s. He got famous for licensing his art to T-shirts made by somebody else, often worn by people with minimal connection to or sentiment for Hardy’s work. Such are the perils of American fame.

A funny thing about subcultures is that by nature, their legacies are collected only in the hazy memories of the tradition’s participants. What happens when those memories fade entirely, when a compendium of the most important collected information about tattooing in the English language is ravaged by dementia? When the mind dies, so does the folklore. Perhaps that is why Francesca Passalacqua, Hardy’s business partner and wife of half a century, is nearing an emotional breaking point. “We’re being very open about Ed’s health,” she says over the phone while making soup. “At this point we have to be.” 

Passalacqua goes on to describe an event earlier in the year, emblematic of Hardy’s faculties slipping away. Hardy had been paying a friend to warehouse mountains of books and memorabilia, but Hardy was the only one who knew about the arrangement. When that memory was lost, Passalacqua received a distressing phone call about the expiry of the arrangement for non-payment, and had no choice but to watch a portion of her husband’s life’s work get dumpstered. 

While the loss of work was personally tragic, it is fairly typical of the tattooing trade and inherent to the difficulties in preservation of its history. A lot of the best stuff—not just Hardy’s—is already gone, lost to fires and theft, or bartered away for drug money or gambling debts, or simply trashed when a landlord reclaims a shop from a delinquent owner. 

Passalacqua is used to the grind. When Hardy first started Realistic Tattoo (the private studio that preceded 1991’s Tattoo City reopening), it was Passalacqua who held down the full-time job and covered the bills so the young artist could pursue his passion. When Hardy struggled with alcoholism in the 1980s and nearly tanked his career, she cared for his son Doug and once again kept her partner afloat until he dried out. Over the past few years, as Hardy’s private struggle with his memory became more difficult to hide, it’s been Passalacqua who has had to shoulder the burden of stewarding a legend. In the United States, legends are protected in the courts, so that has meant a lot of time with lawyers, financial professionals, and Ed Hardy’s many friends and rivals seeking to either help an ailing elder or capitalize on the desperation.

“Ed called me one day and was like ‘Taki, listen, I’m losing entire parts of my day, man,” said Tokyo-born Takahiro Kitamura, who goes by Taki and is one of the proprietors of State of Grace tattoo studio in San Jose. “I didn’t believe him at first, you know, like trying to cheer him up, ‘Ah, it’s going to be OK, Ed.’ But he got real serious with me about how he was getting dementia.” 

The conversations between Taki and his mentor gradually turned toward the future of Hardy’s baby: Hardy Marks Publications. The publishing house that started the literary and ethnographic appraisal of American tattooing, Hardy Marks is where one can go to find the spirit informing the colorful flash on the walls of Tattoo City. For Passalacqua and Hardy, the real future of his legacy is inseparable from the future of tattoo literature and publishing. Hardy’s mission had always been elevating an art form whose only presence in the printed record was on the pages of smut magazines or biker rags. Without preservation, entire schools of art risk bleeding away into obscurity.

It started with Tattootime, a magazine created by Hardy with help from friendly writers and editors with the goal of focusing on the artists. Rather than simply featuring photos of finished work and half-nude bodies, the magazine presented “still life” style portraits of the tattooers themselves, centered as artists instead of being treated as criminals, gang members, or smut peddlers. The subjects were not always morally pristine—Sailor Jerry, the subject of many Hardy Marks books, never let go of the racism towards the Japanese that he developed while serving in World War II—but tattooing is a meritocracy. Either the lines and colors pop on the skin, or they don’t. Because tattooing was folk art, it would never be accepted or considered by galleries, thus Tattootime became the Louvre for scab merchants.

Taki talks about the responsibility to celebrate the next generation of artists, only cracking the occasional nervous joke to signal his appreciation for the weight of Hardy Marks as a legacy. When it’s mentioned that Passalacqua approached him to take it over (and not the other way around), Taki is quick to clarify: “That’s only because it’s not the kind of thing you ask to do, it would be very presumptuous. But of course as soon as it came up, it was no hesitation. Absolute dream come true, I still can’t believe we get to keep this thing going.”

The “we” Taki refers to includes his wife Molly Kitamura, an artist and curator. Much like Passalacqua and Hardy, the two are inseparable in their artistic and professional pursuits, and Taki finds poetry in Hardy Marks staying a family business.

“Hardy has so much respect for Taki’s lineage,” Passalacqua says when asked why Taki was the obvious choice to shepherd Hardy Marks. Those qualifications have nothing to do with Taki’s family name—his parents took a while to warm up to tattooing as a profession—and everything to do with the transmission of wisdom and craft from masters in the tradition. Taki describes his time under Hardy’s wing as hands-on education: trips to Japan to meet cinematographers who worked with Akira Kurosawa, or to Hawaii to meet with some of the world’s last remaining woodblock artists. It may seem subjective—or “gatekept” in the parlance of the time—but Hardy’s prime tattooing years were during the punk explosion of Dead Kennedys–era San Francisco. He’s meticulous about vision and authenticity, to put it mildly.

Zoom out, though, and the transfer of Hardy Marks is about more than just Francesca and Ed passing the torch to Taki and Molly as the next power couple. The “industry” is in shambles. The trade is only lucrative for artists with significant Instagram followings or name brands, as money is drying up for traditional street shops. Cash is no longer en vogue, and cash is still king in tattooing. This isn’t just an economic issue, but an issue of preserving folk history.

Publishing houses like Hardy Marks are not just educational tools for the public but for artists as well. Like punk rock scenes and the zines that gave life to the ethos of its participants, tattoo book publishing serves the dual purpose of giving artists another outlet for revenue while advancing the artists’ statement of purpose. As the last major generation of American tattooists fade away and are replaced by art-school kids with Amazon.com rotary tattoo machines, these are the publications that will maintain the tradition.

The first new work being put out under Hardy Marks’s new leadership is The Black Wave, about Leo Zulueta, the recently retired “father of American tribal tattooing” and proprietor of Spiral Tattoo in Michigan. Like Hardy, Zulueta was a military brat, born into a naval hospital to Filipino-American parents. However, where Hardy was determined to use his talent to propagate a syncretized East Asian/American sailor religion, Zulueta’s fascination was with the Bornean tradition of the Dayak people, whose land was successively stolen by the Dutch, British, Americans, and Japanese. The Dayaks tattoo for many reasons, but one was to mark warriors who collected the heads of invaders. Now the invaders get the tattoos back home without having to risk their heads.

Tribal tattooing is a great example of a modern conundrum in American tattooing. The tribal tattoo has been roundly mocked and stereotyped as being reserved for the biceps of macho goobers, but as is often the case in commercial art, the lowest common denominator betrays the meaning of the original. Much like illegible or nonsensical Chinese lettering, many of the patterns in modern “tribal” tattoos are totally invented with little to no eye toward meaning in the indigenous faith systems they draw from. That’s fine if the customer is happy, but artists like Zulueta cared about accuracy, and tried to tune customers into the right frequency. Cultural appropriation is like the adage about pornography—hard to define but known when seen—but tattooing’s cross-cultural appeal and syncretized iconography makes it quite impossible to easily categorize.

Hardy himself has been on the receiving end of appropriation accusations, which the artist simply ignored. “Ed introduced the Japanese tattoo to America,” Taki remembers saying at a panel in San Diego at a successful museum show of Japanese woodblock and folk art. “And if that bothers you, I’m the fucking curator, OK? So, talk to me about it.” 

Most tattoo shops are rejections of the concept of appropriation entirely, with orthodox Christian icons next to venerated icons of Shiva and ornately rendered images of Satan. Hare Krishna patches, incense, old paintings of Vedic swastikas hung in shops next to posters that say NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF—combinations that make at least one customer per day wonder if they’ve stumbled into the wrong type of place. Maybe they have, but they’re welcome to stay as long as they’re nice. Tattooing is for everyone and while comfort with taboo is a prerequisite, there is minimal tolerance for bigotry or judgment of one’s past.

“The most beautiful piece I’ve ever seen was an icon of the Virgin Mary on a guy’s back who had done 25 years [in prison],” says Charlie Cartwright, an old-timer with an old-time friendship with Ed Hardy. “It’s a devotional in there. Not much to do except work on the guy’s back, and it’s one little pin prick at a time for years. The detail was unlike anything you see in a shop.”

“Good Time Charlie” made his name in East L.A. at the tail end of the Chicano Movement. Like Zulueta, Cartwright was pushing forward a style of tattooing that would eventually become its own brand: black and grey realism, derogatorily referred to as “penitentiary style.” Similar to the backpiece that Cartwright described seeing on a former inmate, the style is distinguished by its use of a single needle and black ink only. The magic is in the depth the artist achieves with limited resources, even the “tricks” used to hide sloppy technique. Cartwright doesn’t give himself any credit for the style taking off, instead highlighting the many artists who came through his shop and the incredible Latin and Chicano culture he was lucky enough to come up within. “I just look at it as, I was giving them the haircut they asked for,” he says with a laugh. “That’s what the guys who came into the shop wanted. It’s not like I had some grand vision for fine line tattoos, I just liked giving people what they wanted.”

Cartwright was raised by a Pentecostal preacher with a short temper and a screaming right hand. When his daddy forbade tattoos according to Leviticus, Charlie let him know that he was being “lawyeristic” because Leviticus didn’t apply to gentiles. Cartwright said he ran away from home after his father beat him for tattooing his little brother, and started selling tattoo services out of the trunk of his car. The mainstream acceptance of tattooing in the 21st century can obscure what tattooing used to be: vagabond work for men like Charlie, left behind by a society that demanded compliance. Ed Hardy took a liking to him immediately.

“[Ed] used to hang out at Charlie’s shop and come home and tell me that I had to come down with him, because it’s so fun,” Passalacqua recalls. “He would be telling me a story about how there was some fight with the lowrider guys in the parking lot and someone tried to hide in the shop, and I’d just be listening and thinking, ‘There’s no way I’m going with you.’” 

Hardy and Cartwright came up together, so Good Time Charlie has no shortage of stories from watching the tattooing trade turn into a bonafide industry over the course of his career. But while Hardy was able to preserve his treasured memories in Hardy Marks books, Cartwright is still trying to get a museum off the ground in Long Beach, known as the Tattoo Heritage Project. It’s been slow going. Sponsors are few and far between, and the kinds of businesses willing to throw charity money to museums that display fine art tend to be reluctant to engage with true subcultures.

The other problem with the Tattoo Heritage Project is the impossibility of making something comprehensive. The majority of tattoo art that has survived the generations exists in private collections with no cataloguing. In fact, the dynamics of the industry in 2024 are part and parcel with Cartwright’s struggles. The best museums for tattoo art are the street shops owned by the men and women with private collections, all displayed on their walls. Tattoo is a living tradition, and as street shops are pushed aside for more boutique experiences, so too is the preservation of work by its forebears. 

“I was visiting a shop—people are so nice to me, they’ll have me in and look at my work and listen to my stories—and one of the artists said to me that I had to check out his new space, that he was leaving and starting his own studio,” Cartwright recalls. “I said, ‘Oh great, another quiet room with no personality and a bunch of your own drawings on the walls.’” 

Cartwright is quick to clarify that he thinks boutique studio tattooists are just as talented as the ones working in street shops. But it’s a common refrain among those who believe street shops are “more authentic” as tattoo experiences—even as the concept of authenticity is rendered squishy by the modern reality of commercial art marketplaces. Instagram followings pay the bills in the tattoo trade, and walk-ins are drying up for the young artists trying to build their portfolios in the dying street shops. When the cash dries up, the shop closes and the artists scatter, and decades of cherished art ends up in a junk shop or an attic. A tattoo gun is a dream machine, but lately it feels like all the dreams are stuck in the computer.

For now, the history is still alive in local street shops. The permanent markings etched into skin by the old-timers have turned to dust, but their imaginations remain on the walls, for new artists to see and use and tinker with—yes, even those who tinker in a way that the old-timers and reactionaries disapprove of. That’s how it’s always been; these are museums and workshops. The museums have the high culture, but if you want uncurated access to America’s dreams and nightmares, best to visit a proper street shop before the dreamers die off. Tattoo City is dead, but Tattoo City can still live forever.