Archive Note
The shop sits at 1033 Smith Street in Honolulu's Chinatown, the historic sailor district that made Honolulu one of the busiest tattoo ports of the Pacific. Norman Sailor Jerry Collins opened it in 1960 and worked there until his death on 12 June 1973, leaving instructions through his wife that the shop pass to one of three trusted tattooers, Zeke Owens, Don Ed Hardy, or Mike Malone, and otherwise be destroyed; Hardy was in Japan and Owens already had a San Diego shop, so it went to Malone, who renamed it China Sea Tattoo as a tribute to Collins's years sailing the China seas. Malone ran the shop for roughly twenty-five years until about 2001, continuing in Collins's American Traditional idiom while developing his own work, including the Mr. Lucky skull mascot, and preserving Collins's flash and working drawings as the principal bridge between Sailor Jerry's tradition and the post-Collins tattoo world. In 2014 the address reopened as Old Ironside Tattoo, the name Collins used on his Honolulu radio program, framing itself as the continuation of his original studio.