| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | C.W. Eldridge |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | 2804 San Pablo Avenue · Berkeley |
| Date | 1980 CE |
| Style / Technique | archival American traditional, tattoo history preservation |
| Connected to | Don Ed Hardy, Paul Rogers, Henk Schiffmacher (Hanky Panky) |
Archive Note
Charles W. Eldridge, known as Chuck or C.W., was born on March 26, 1947, in western North Carolina. He enlisted in the United States Navy in 1965, and it was on boot-camp liberty in San Diego that he first met the working tattoo trade. Wartime San Diego ran a high volume of military tattooing, and the sight of it stayed with him. He got his first tattoos there and started a personal scrapbook of the craft. That scrapbook is where the archive begins.
His route into tattooing ran through metal. Out of the Navy and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, Eldridge built custom bicycle frames in the 1970s as a student and co-worker of Albert Eisentraut, the figure widely called the godfather of American custom frame building. The fabrication work taught him how machines come apart and go back together, which later carried over to tattoo equipment. He worked briefly as a frame builder in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the late 1970s before turning to tattooing full time.
The tattooing came from Don Ed Hardy. Eldridge met Hardy in 1974 and was tattooed by him repeatedly over about four years. By one account Hardy offered him an apprenticeship in 1978. He also worked with Henry Goldfield at Goldfield's Tattoo Club in the Bay Area, sharpening his hand in the traditional American style alongside the Hardy circuit.
In 1980, while working with Goldfield, Eldridge founded the Tattoo Archive. It started as a private research and mail-order effort to collect flash sheets, photographs, letters, and business cards, the paper trail of a trade that kept almost no records of itself. Around 1984 he secured a Berkeley storefront at 2804 San Pablo Avenue. The shop ran as a hybrid the trade had not seen before. It was a working custom studio, a museum, and a bookstore at once, and for over two decades it drew historians and tattooers to Berkeley to study the roots of the craft. He and his wife, Harriet Cohen, ran it together.
The collection that fixed its importance came in 1990. When Paul Rogers died that year, he left his entire body of artifacts, correspondence, photographs, and tattoo machines to the Tattoo Archive. To protect it, Eldridge joined Alan Govenar, Don Ed Hardy, and Henk Schiffmacher in founding the Paul Rogers Tattoo Research Center in January 1993, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit named for Rogers and housed inside the Archive. Rogers did not found the institution that carries his name. Eldridge and his three co-founders did, and they attached his name to it.
Eldridge took the Archive home. He relocated it from Berkeley to downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, by one account in 2007 and by another in 2008, returning to the part of the state he came from. The Winston-Salem location still works as a studio, museum, bookstore, and research center. From it he has published biographical booklets on historical figures, Paul Rogers and Bert Grimm among them, and supplied photographs and research to books, articles, and documentaries on tattoo history.
What Eldridge built is a record. Most of American tattooing happened without paperwork, in shops that threw out their flash when the owner died. He spent more than four decades collecting that paper, housing it, and publishing from it, turning a sailor's scrapbook into one of the trade's working memories.