| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Amund Dietzel |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Early Modern |
| Location | Milwaukee · Wisconsin |
| Date | 1913 CE |
| Style / Technique | American traditional, bold-line bright-color flash |
| Connected to | The Sailor Tattoo Tradition, Lew Alberts, August "Cap" Coleman |
Archive Note
Amund Dietzel was born in Kristiania, the city now called Oslo, on February 28, 1891. His father died, and as a teenager he went to sea in the Norwegian merchant fleet. He learned to tattoo on the water, marking fellow sailors with a shipboard skill that would become his trade. In July 1907 the bark Augusta, out of Fredrikstad, wrecked off the coast of Quebec. Dietzel survived. Rather than go back to the sea, he took work ashore.
He reached Milwaukee in 1913, twenty-three years old, and found something strange. No one was tattooing in the city. He decided to stay and made Milwaukee his permanent home, setting up downtown near the newly built Hotel Wisconsin. He would work there for roughly fifty-one years.
He moved through a run of downtown addresses. North Third Street in the 1910s, 948 Plankinton Avenue from 1930,612 North Fifth Street, and finally 304 West Wells Street. The shops changed. The man behind the machine did not. Through the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and both world wars, Dietzel tattooed the working men, sailors, soldiers, and recruits who came through a busy Midwestern city.
What he built on those bodies became a style. Clean bold lines, solid bright color, a deep catalog of flash. That look is what later generations would call traditional, or old school, and Dietzel was one of the men who fixed its visual grammar. He was part of the small cohort of immigrant and itinerant tattooers who carried the trade through its lean Depression and mid-century years, when the work was neither respectable nor easy money.
He stayed at it longer than almost anyone. In 1964, at seventy-three, he sold his business to his friend and collaborator Gib "Tatts" Thomas. The two kept working side by side until the Milwaukee Common Council ban on tattooing took effect on July 1, 1967, shutting the trade out of the city. Dietzel never took formal apprentices, but he taught by example. The writer and tattooer Samuel Steward, who worked as Phil Sparrow, came to Milwaukee, learned from Dietzel, opened his own parlor, and found he could not compete with the older man.
Dietzel died of leukemia on February 9, 1974, in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, and was buried at Pinelawn Memorial Park. He might have vanished into the same fog that swallowed most early American tattooers, remembered by a handful of collectors and nobody else. He did not. Milwaukee tattooer Jon Reiter tracked down his surviving flash and studio material, worked with Dietzel grandsons, and published the two-volume These Old Blue Arms in 2010 and 2011.
In 2013 the Milwaukee Art Museum mounted Tattoo: Flash Art of Amund Dietzel, July 3 to October 13. A sailor who came off a wrecked ship and set up a chair in a city that had no tattooer ended up on a museum wall, his half-century of bold-line work named as one of the foundations of American traditional tattooing.