Wear Your Dreams: My Life in Tattoos

1.

My Life in Tattoos

Today there have been nearly one billion Ed Hardy retail items unleashed on an unsuspecting but highly receptive public. That staggering sum makes no more sense to me than it does to you. It’s more than T-shirts, hats, and running shoes. They’ve got everything. For a while, there were seventy sublicenses. A licensee sent us a bitchin’ iPad cover with a leaping koi. There is red wine, white wine, champagne. My designs appeared on everything you can dress yourself with, on cigarette lighters, or air fresheners, you name it. I asked one of our guys just what the fuck does that have to do with air fresheners? Nothing, he said. People like the designs.

The big snarling tiger with the crazy green eyes I first painted in 1968, when I was just starting out doing tattoos in Vancouver. I took it from an old-time tattoo design, which I’m sure was taken from a circus poster. The Love Kills Slowly heart and skull design, something I first drew in 1971 at my shop in San Diego, is the most popular. It’s like the Ford insignia of the Ed Hardy line.

I’m not a public figure. People don’t know what I look like and I don’t get out and around a lot. I was riding the subway in New York last year and there was a lady with this totally bling Ed Hardy bag. We were jammed up together. When I got off at my stop, I handed her a card and told her, I’m Ed Hardy and I really appreciate you supporting the brand. I was in North Carolina for a tattoo convention and the maid came into my room, a young, hip gal with a couple of tattoos. She asked what I was doing in town and I said, tattoo convention. She took a look at me in my plaid shirt and cardigan sweater. Really? she said.

I’m a tattooer, I told her. My name’s Ed Hardy.

She whipped out her cell phone. Wait a minute, wait a minute, she told me, then shouted into her phone, Do you know who I’m standing here with? Ed Hardy! I love Ed Hardy.

When he signed me up, Christian Audigier told me they were going to make me a star and I would travel around the world in private jets and limousines and sign autographs for a half hour wherever I went. I told them, in only the nicest possible way, that I’d rather they would pay me and leave me alone.

That I became the best-known fashion brand in the world today is beyond laughable. Francesca and I are like the Beverly Hillbillies. All this is so strange to me. I’ve had to learn to pay attention. We had to mount a lawsuit to gain back control over the brand, but all that was settled. Today we are partnered with the New York brand management firm Iconix, and things are on a more even keel.

All I ever wanted to do was to make art and be an artist. I didn’t want to be judged by the medium of my expression. When I started, nobody thought tattoos were art or that people who did tattoos were artists. Of course, I knew the tattoo shops and the people who tattooed lived in an underground world, but I never thought it wasn’t art. When I took this up as a life calling, the so-called world of high art, needless to say, had no idea what to make of tattoo artists. We didn’t exist in the world of galleries and museums. I never took that very seriously anyway, except that I didn’t want to be viewed as a lesser human being because I didn’t paint on canvas. The art world erects these artificial barriers and then gets to say who is an artist and who isn’t. With tattoos, you are always going to get that to a degree because it’s got that loaded thing—it’s on skin and it’s messy—all ink and blood. You have to look at people’s bodies, which pushes all sorts of buttons. And they can’t resell it, so they don’t know what to do with it.

Today there is more tattooing than any time in history. Tattoos go back as far as civilization. The early Egyptian mummies were tattooed. The Pictish people in pre–Anglo-Saxon England, where we get the word picture, were all tattooed. Tattoos may have predated cave paintings. I have no idea why people get tattoos. You might as well ask why people make art. The tattoo is a marker of life’s journey. Tattoos are found in all cultures. The Pacific Islands had great tattoo traditions. Sadly, the Judeo-Christian bunch rejected tattoos as pagan markings, which pretty much assured the underground status of the tattoo in the Western world, where it’s done in sketchy parts of town, by people with strange, noisy machines. When I opened Realistic Tattoo in 1974 in San Francisco, the modern tattoo movement was barely beginning to mass on the horizon.

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I started corresponding with Sailor Jerry, the greatest tattooer of his generation, when I was first working in San Diego in 1969. We traded several letters a week because we had a lot of dead time in shop. We swapped photos of our work, compared notes, delved into aesthetics, techniques, and all aspects of the art of tattooing. We were both pushing epic tattoos, more breakthrough work with an Asian theme. We wrote each other constantly, but we only talked on the phone a couple of times. The first time I put a big tattoo on a woman, Jerry happened to call and ask, What are you doing? I told him I was fixing to put a big Japanese design on a good-looking young lady’s back, just to bust his balls, because I knew he would be mad with envy.

She was a hippie chick who had been in my shop before. I remembered her when an old friend from my San Francisco Art Institute days called and said he met a girl in a bar who had some tattoos, which was highly unusual in those days. He was one of my few friends from school who showed any interest in tattoos. He was with me the night I got my second tattoo in Oakland and was wearing a couple of my earliest pieces. He was back in San Francisco after a long time living out of town. At the time, he was a total lush, slamming them back at bars with strangers, and ended up one night taking her home with him. She gave him a dose. God damn it, watch out if she shows up in your place, he said.

She did come back down and turned up at the shop, looking to get another tattoo. She picked something off the wall, but was vague about what she wanted and pretty much left it up to me. I had this design on the wall, sort of a Japanese grim reaper in a large, fluttering robe, brandishing a big Japanese ax. On the ax is the kanji (Japanese symbol) for death. I think maybe it was my idea, a good spot for it. I put it on her inner thigh. I didn’t mention what was on the ax. I thought this was appropriate—a little warning to those in the know.

A couple of months later, the day Sailor Jerry called, she came back in with a man, a native Japanese. He barely spoke English. He was an architecture student who picked her up hitchhiking in the Haight-Ashbury and she talked him into driving her down to San Diego so she could get a big tattoo. He was more than slightly baffled by the whole thing. In Japan, tattoos are traditionally associated with the yakuza, the criminal underworld, and not something for anyone in polite society. He wore a deer-in-the-headlights expression and who knows what he thought the payoff was. He drove her. He was her patsy.

I pulled the curtain over the front window and locked the door. I had a private area I could close off if I was tattooing, and everything out front was nailed down, so if people were out there looking around, you wouldn’t lose anything. But I figured I’d better lock the front door. She stripped down (following Jerry’s lead, I would tell females not to worry about taking off their clothes—I’m just like a doctor) and got everything off. I drew the tattoo on her back. When I started outlining, she began squealing, Whoa, whoa, whoa. She had multiple tattoos. You know what this feels like, I told her.

Who knows what substance she was on? If I could just have a drink, she said.

I do not do tattoos on people who have been drinking. I always held to that. You might get a sailor with a couple of beers in him and that would be okay, but I do not work on drunks. I really wanted to do this tattoo, though. After arguing with her a bit and more wiggling, I gave the Japanese guy some money and sent him around the corner for a half-pint. I handed her the bottle and told her to take a swig. She drained it.

Immediately her true inner beauty came out. I was trying to do the tattoo and she was moving around, moving around, and started to get incoherent. I was thinking Jesus Christ. The Japanese guy was terrified. You couldn’t tell whether she was trying to beat the shit out of me or fuck me. She was very small. She jumped up and was hanging on to me like a monkey, with all this ink and grease on her back. I was thinking it would be better not to get involved in something like this again.

I had some of the lines on her back, but she finally passed out. Many times in this business, you find yourself in a situation with a person where things are going wrong, but this always stood out in my memory as an especially bad choice on my part. I should have steered clear of this dame from the start. When she passed out, the Japanese gentleman looked even more terrified. Is she dead? he asked.

No, she’s just blacked out, I told him. I’ve got to get her out of here. She can’t stay here. You’re going to help.

It was early in the afternoon. I opened at noon and ran until midnight or later. They had showed up around opening time. Sailors were going to be coming off the ships. I had business coming in. I had to get her out of the shop and he was hopeless. He didn’t know what to do.

I told him we had to take her somewhere and called a Travelodge down by the Pacific Coast Highway. We got her clothes on. She was in full drool, out of it. I got her into his car and we drove her down there. It completely looked like we were transporting a body. I went into the motel office and pointed to the car. My cousin is really ill, I told the clerk. I’m getting the room for her. I’ll pay for it and take her to her room.

They gave me the keys. We pulled into the back of the parking lot and took her out of the backseat. She was disheveled, reeked of booze. Her vest was riding up and you could see the big bandage on her back. We were shuffling her down the hall when another room door opens and there was a full family—Mom and Pop, Buddy and Sis—out for a clean, wholesome time in San Diego. They did a full freeze as the Japanese guy and the tattooed man dragged this unconscious wretch past their doorway. It was full saucer eyes for all of them.

I did the entire ink drawing for the tattoo on her back and took a photo that I was going to send to Jerry. I got about half the outline down before she started going crazy on me. I took the money out of her vest, left her in the motel room, and advised the guy to be careful about picking up hitchhikers. I guess he drove back to San Francisco. That was my first experience with putting a big tattoo on a woman.

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When I started in the business, ladies didn’t get tattoos. The tattooed lady was strictly a sideshow attraction. In fact, when I started, most men who got tattooed were in the military.

I must have put more than ten thousand tattoos on servicemen before I even started with the epic stuff. There is probably somebody wearing an Ed Hardy tattoo in every city in the country.

Tattoos were always more than a way to make a living to me. From the beginning, tattoos were a mission and I was an evangelist. I wanted to expand the possibilities of the medium and I wanted to elevate the art form. Having graduated from art school, I brought with me to the field of tattooing—for better or worse—a sense of art history, a fierce dedication to the medium, and something of a chip on my shoulder toward the rest of the world that failed to hold the art of tattoo in the same regard I did.

When I began tattooing, there were no more than five hundred other tattooers in North America. Tattoos were not a part of polite society. My early clients at Realistic came from the peripheries of society—closet cases, Hells Angels, hippie visionaries—and the whole practice of tattoos oozed from there into the mainstream culture over the next twenty years. Nor was this a process I witnessed from the sidelines. My fingerprints can be found on every major wrinkle in the worldwide movement, from introducing Japanese-style tattoos to the West (or American-style tattoos to Japan) to the new tribalism that returned the tattoo tradition to the South Seas islands for the first time in a hundred years. I watched the entire world get tattooed. I tattooed more than a few of them myself.

2.

Kiddie Tattoos

Corona del Mar, where I grew up in the fifties, was just a small beach town about forty miles south of Los Angeles. It was actually part of Newport Beach, which was a millionaires’ playground. A lot of movie stars such as John Wayne and those types had yachts moored in the beautiful harbor in Newport. The whole area had great surfing spots. Duke Kahanamoku, the great Hawaiian surfer, introduced surfing to California there. Before the jetty was built on the Corona del Mar side, they used to get big waves in the twenties. The beaches are really beautiful.

It was a conservative, small town. Officially part of Newport, unincorporated Corona del Mar was a distinct community with lots of open land on each side. Laguna Beach, which was always known as an art colony, was six miles down the road.

I was born Donald Edward Talbott Hardy on January 5, 1945, in Des Moines, Iowa. My father was serving in World War II, and my mother went to live with her parents while he was away. After the war, she quickly moved back to California. My father, Wilfred Ivan Samuel (Sam) Hardy, was from England originally. His passion really was photography, but he would do anything to bring in a buck. He did a lot of aerial photography. My parents met when my mother, Mildred Sandstrom, was hand-tinting photographs in a big lab in Des Moines, my mother’s hometown, where he was stationed with the Air Force. But I grew up a few blocks from the beach in this little beach town.

My father Sam was a real soldier-of-fortune, a world traveler. He came over to North America from England, first landing in Canada when he was about twenty, and always wanted to travel. He had been married before he met my mother and eventually took off and worked other places while they were married. He was in Saudi Arabia, working for Aramco, when they were laying the first oil pipelines in the late forties. I have photographs of him wearing a burnoose and standing next to a camel. They both took lots of photographs and my mother saved everything. Sam landed a position as an engineer in Japan during the Occupation. He went there when I was six. He’d never been to Asia. He’d been in Europe a lot, and the Middle East, but he completely went nuts for Japan. My mother figured out shortly that he wasn’t going to come back and she filed for divorce. He ended up marrying a Japanese woman, a secretary who worked in the office.

He did stay in touch with us and sent child support. They had a pre-fab house that they’d built with a GI loan in 1947. My father did a lot of the work on the house himself. He kept making payments, and he sent over all this exotic stuff from Japan. There were always these things from where Daddy went, this mysterious land across the sea: tea sets, little framed pictures, a silk jacket with embroidered dragons, tigers, and hawks.

We went back to Des Moines for a year. My grandfather was very sick and I attended first grade in Iowa, before we came back to Corona del Mar. After my grandfather died, my grandmother moved out with us, so I was raised with a strong base of sympathetic female support. What kind of pie do you want when you get home from school, Donnie?

Apple, Grammy. I was a tubby kid.

My best friend, Len Jones, lived a block away. The Second World War still loomed over us. Lenny and I used to play war. Both our dads had been in the war and we had fatigues, dummy M1 carbines used for training, and helmet liners that looked like actual helmets. I always tried to be accurate. If you’re going to play cowboys and Indians, you want to wear the right gear. We also lived with a great sense of the Wild West.

Our street ended at the top of my block, the town limits, where there was barbed wire around the Irvine Ranch. In the summer, we could go to the end of the block and watch cowboys on horseback round up horses. The West was totally alive to me. The beach was just down the street and cowboys were only blocks away.

There was an old character named Colonel Blake who ran a Wild West Museum on Highway 101, a block away. It was a funky, old plaster building with a dirt floor and displays behind chicken wire. The colonel was a Buffalo Bill look-alike who dressed the whole part right down to the white goatee. He had this antebellum Southern-style, two-story house with a fish pond in front across the street from Lenny’s house, where he’d sit on the porch in a rocking chair. In the fifties, there were still direct connections to that kind of Americana, although it was rapidly disappearing.

Lenny’s parents, who were from Chicago, were much younger than mine. His mother was a gorgeous Italian-American and his father was Irish. His dad was a hip guy who drove a ’49 fastback Cadillac, wore a Ronald Colman moustache, and listened to jazz. Len Sr. had been in the army and had several tattoos. When we were about ten, we got the idea to take a serious look at his dad’s tattoos.

He had a clipper ship on one arm, an anchor on his hand, and a few other things. And he had the word Stardust, his favorite song, on his forearm. He was a big Artie Shaw fan. I thought that was so cool—to have your favorite song tattooed on you. Len and I locked onto this tattoo thing and, along with playing war, cowboys and Indians, engineers on a train, we started playing tattoo. And we started drawing tattoo designs.

Tattoo designs were hard to find. You would see tattoos in cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post. Tattoos, for some reason, commonly cropped up in cartoons in the fifties, maybe because so many men had been in the military during World War II and Korea. Beyond that, what did we know about tattoos? We drew anchors, eagles, and hearts and ribbons that said Mom. I began obsessively drawing up flash (the sheets of designs that could be turned into tattoos). When we found Mongol colored pencils you could dip into water and turn into watercolor, we started figuring out ways to draw tattoos on the neighborhood kids.

We collected soda bottles on the beach to raise some change for Maybelline eyeliner, which we used for the black outlines. Len’s mom suggested that. We set up a toy tattoo shop in the spare room in my house that we called the den.

The den was plastered with souvenirs from my father’s travels. A bow and arrows from the Philippines were on the wall, alongside a German officer’s dress dagger and an Arabian knife with a curved blade. Flags hung all over the ceiling—including a big Nazi flag from Nuremberg Stadium from when he was in Germany during the war trials. There was a flag from Saudi Arabia with a big scimitar and Arabian writing. There was a Korean flag with a yin-yang and trigrams. The walls were painted screaming blue with a bright red door that went out to the backyard. Sam did have a penchant for drama.

I taped up this tattoo flash we had been drawing and started trying to get neighborhood kids in. Hey, I’m going to draw some tattoos. You’d try to charge them for it—Two cents for that one—but I put them on anyway, because I just wanted the excuse. There were strict rules: you had to have your parents’ permission and you had to be at least nine years old.

There was a crippled guy named Tommy who ran a shoe-repair shop three blocks away on the Coast Highway. He had a typewriter and we had him make us tattoo licenses, complete with our fifth-grade photos for mug shots.

My mother took photos of everything with her Brownie box camera. She took lots of photos of me sitting and drawing tattoos on kids. The town was small enough that people started seeing these kids wandering around with tattoos that looked pretty damn real, and it came to the attention of the proprietor of the local weekly. He caught up with us on our way to Cannon’s Market, where we would sit around, drink Cokes, and read comic books. He said he had heard about the tattoo shop we set up and wanted to know if he could come by and take a picture for the paper.

He ran a good-sized shot of us posing the way I knew the tattooers posed. We had a kid in the chair and another one standing behind us with stuff on his chest. We sat on either side and I knew to look at the camera with the tattooing tool poised. And we were holding our typewritten licenses.

Our education began in earnest when we figured out there were tattoo shops twenty-five miles up the coast on the Long Beach Pike, a big, scary, pre-Disneyland, pre-theme-park amusement park built on a pier on the beach. Disneyland wouldn’t even open for another year. We would take the Greyhound bus, a seventy-five-cent fare. Our parents let us go. We’d get somebody to buy cigarettes for us. We’d smoke a pack of Marlboros and spend the day hanging out, combing our ducktails, looking at all the crazy shit on the Pike, maybe go on a few rides. Mainly we went for the tattoo shops. There were six shops on the Pike and most of them would kick kids out. You were supposed to be eighteen years old to be in a tattoo shop. But there was one guy who didn’t mind: Bert Grimm, the greatest tattooer on the Pike.

He had come over from St. Louis a couple of years before and would let us hang out in his shop as long as we beat it when a cop came around. Bert was the quintessential tattoo flim-flam man—great storyteller, great bullshitter, great self-promoter. But Bert could also really tattoo. He had a strong, bold, power-hitting Americana style. He wore a green eyeshade, suspenders, and always had his long sleeves rolled down because all the work on his arms was old, blown-out, and faded. He never showed his own tattoos. There were photos of him from when he was about fifteen, from when he learned to tattoo in Portland. He had a big portrait of Geronimo on his chest. He’d tell the stories—how he had tattooed Bonnie and Clyde—and you could never distinguish what was true from what wasn’t, but he sure knew how to roll them.

When he was in St. Louis, he owned a chain of photo studios, and took fabulous big-format, Speed Graphic black-and-white photographs of his work. It helped make him famous. He got hip to the power of photographing and displaying the tattoos you’re doing. His window on the Pike was stacked with photos of impressive tattoos. He did a lot of large chest and back pieces. He worked extremely fast, blasted the work on. He developed his speed tattooing workers on the riverboats running the Mississippi, who only had a short time on shore between stops. He painted beautiful flash, a lot of it only in black and red. It made for faster application, but also was a masterful style challenge, to imply full-color range with limited means.

Bert had a real folk style, not fine-tuned like Sailor Jerry or other guys with more finesse, but you could read it a block away. He was my role model. I pestered him to show me how the machines worked. He told me if I was still interested when I was fifteen, he would teach me how to tattoo. That seemed like a long four years away to me.

His place was everything a tattoo shop should be. I copied designs off the wall. I would do thumbnail sketches, go home, and draw more finished versions. I was obsessed.

There were almost no books on tattooing, but there were ads for tattoo supplies in the back of Popular Mechanics, one of the magazines that showed you how to build a helicopter in your backyard, raise chinchillas for big money in your spare time, that kind of stuff. It was all part of the can-do postwar spirit of