Archive Note
Chris Garver was born in Pittsburgh in 1970 and trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the School of Visual Arts in New York before apprenticing under Jonathan Shaw at Fun City Tattoo on St. Mark's Place in 1991, during the city's tattoo ban. He became one of the foundational Western practitioners of large-scale traditional Japanese tattooing, pulling dragons, koi, tigers, and hannya from ukiyo-e sources like Hokusai and Kuniyoshi. He reached a wide audience on TLC's Miami Ink (2005 to 2008), co-owned True Tattoo in Hollywood, kept up long guest runs at Three Tides Tattoo in Osaka, and in 2017 co-founded Five Points Tattoo in Manhattan with Ami James.