Archive Note
Originally from Mexico City and raised in South Los Angeles, Quintanar taught himself to tattoo with a homemade rotary machine and went on to work for several years alongside Jack Rudy at Good Time Charlie's Tattooland in Anaheim, the founding institution of the professional Chicano fine-line style that Charlie Cartwright and Rudy started in East Los Angeles in 1975. His work pairs single-needle outlines and smooth photographic gray-wash shading with Catholic devotional imagery reflecting his Latin roots, alongside Meso-American and South LA barrio motifs, and he is consistently named in the trade press among the foremost living practitioners of the genre. He is the founder and owner of Deer's Eye Studio in Long Beach, California, where he also works under the name Chuvinci, serves on the board of the Tattoo Heritage Project, the nonprofit founded by Cartwright to preserve the Chicano fine-line lineage, and is featured in the documentary Tattoo Nation. Exact start and end years for his studios are not fixed in public sources.