| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Colonel Bill Todd |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | Long Beach Pike · California |
| Date | 1947 CE |
| Style / Technique | Long Beach Pike American traditional, sailor and military flash; Jim Dandy machine builder |
| Connected to | Bob Shaw, Painless Jack Tryon, Bert Grimm |
Archive Note
Colonel Bill Todd grew up on a farm and rarely saw a tattoo until the Air Force. In 1947, stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, he visited "Painless" Jack Tryon, a carnival tattooer working out of a circus wagon on Houston Street. Tryon sold him a starter kit for thirty-five dollars, a small outline machine, a bottle of black pigment, and three Air Force stencils. Back in the barracks, Todd and a buddy took turns tattooing fellow airmen, and the airmen lined up. That is where the career began. The "Colonel" was almost certainly a personality nickname rather than a real commission. By one reading of the record, a recruit at Lackland in 1947 could not have held the rank of full colonel.
By about 1949 Todd was tattooing in Clarksville, Tennessee, outside Fort Campbell, the Army paratrooper base straddling the Kentucky line, per the Tattoo Archive. The base towns of Clarksville and Hopkinsville, Kentucky kept a cluster of small storefronts going on soldier traffic, and that economy is where Todd built his civilian trade. In the 1950s, in Clarksville, he trained Joe Queen, later known as "The Original Kokomo Joe," per the Tattoo Archive Joe Queen file. In 1959 Bob Shaw joined Todd in Clarksville, and in 1960 Shaw moved to Hopkinsville to keep working with him. That partnership held for the rest of both men's working lives.
In 1973 Todd moved west to Long Beach, California, where Shaw had bought Bert Grimm's shop at 22 South Chestnut Place, the oldest tattoo studio in the country. The two of them ran the Pike shop together. That same year, with Shaw, Todd opened a separate shop in Santa Ana to train Shaw's son Bobby Shaw Jr., just out of the Army, and a young Bob Roberts. Roberts went on to found Spotlight Tattoo on Melrose Avenue in 1982. The Santa Ana chair is where the Grimm flash vocabulary crossed into the Hollywood tattoo corridor of the 1980s.
The Shaw and Todd partnership kept buying Grimm's holdings as Grimm retired. They took his San Diego shop in 1976 and his Portland, Oregon shop in 1978, per the Tattoo Archive Bob Shaw file. In January 1978 Todd reached back into the Long Beach network and brought Don Deaton up to Portland to help run the Grimm shop alongside Todd's nephew Dave Orlowski. Two years later Deaton and Orlowski bought the shop and renamed it Sea Tramp Tattoo Company. Most of the Portland traditional shops that followed descend from that one phone call. When the Shaw family relocated to Texas in 1983, Todd stayed in Long Beach and managed the Chestnut Place shop on their behalf, keeping the country's longest-running studio open.
Todd also built the "Jim Dandy" tattoo machine, a coil-and-frame working machine that stayed in circulation for decades. Trade-press machine histories name its working users across the field, Charlie Cartwright, Don Ed Hardy, Lyle Tuttle, Jack Rudy, and Corey Miller among them. After Todd died, his son Larry V. Mora kept the design in production at Col Todd Original Tattoo Machine in Twentynine Palms, California, the same desert town where Todd himself had tattooed.
Todd's flash circulates in the collector market and was chosen by Jonathan Shaw for "Vintage Tattoo Flash: 100 Years of Traditional Tattoos from the Collection of Jonathan Shaw" (powerHouse Books, 2016). In 1992 Jonathan Shaw interviewed him for the first issue of "International Tattoo Art." Outer Limits Tattoo, which holds the Chestnut Place shop today, called Todd "a tattooer's tattooer of the old school, a perfect southern gentleman with a streak of the badass bootcamp drill sergeant." He was born in 1929 and died in 1994, by the Tattoo Archive's dates. The exact dates of his birth and death have not surfaced in any record.