| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Danny Danzl |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Early Modern |
| Location | Seattle · Washington |
| Date | 1941 CE |
| Style / Technique | Pacific Northwest American traditional, maritime sailor flash |
| Connected to | Percy Waters, Greg Irons, Vyvyn Lazonga |
Archive Note
Clarence J. Danzl, known as Danny, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1911 and learned the craft in Detroit, Michigan, under Percy Waters, the early twentieth-century designer and supplier who ran a large mail-order house there. That training gave Danzl two things at once. He left Detroit with the artistic vocabulary of American traditional flash and a mechanical grasp of how tattoo machines and their power systems were built and tuned.
He then served in the United States Navy, working on fellow sailors during his enlistment and building experience in the maritime style. His exact naval service dates are not documented. After the Navy he worked as a merchant seaman and kept refining the craft, tattooing out of temporary spaces in Colorado and in Portland, Oregon, before he settled in Seattle, Washington.
In 1941 Danzl opened a permanent shop he called Seattle Tattoo, on First Avenue in the city's Skid Row district. The clientele was rough and working class, sailors, loggers, merchant marines, and laborers. In the 1950s he rebranded the business as the Seattle Tattoo Emporium, choosing "Emporium" to signal that the shop was not limited to standard military designs but would execute any custom work a client asked for.
The decision that defined the shop was simply staying open. Tattooing's popularity fell hard at mid-century, yet the Seattle Tattoo Emporium remained one of the very few continuously operating shops in the Pacific Northwest. Danzl carried the trade's heritage in the region through its leanest decades, the years when most studios closed.
In 1972 Danzl took on Beverly Bean, who would later work under the name Madame Vyvyn Lazonga, as an apprentice. The apprenticeship was rigorous. He taught her not only how to apply pigment to skin but the mechanical inner workings of the trade, how to build, tune, and repair tattoo machines. Lazonga went on to become the first woman to open and operate her own professional tattoo studio in the United States, which makes Danzl a direct mentor in breaking the trade's gender line.
From 1980 to 1982 the Emporium became a hub for the modern tattoo renaissance. Greg Irons, the San Francisco underground-comix artist who lived from 1947 to 1984, came north to work alongside Danzl and Pete Stephens, an artist who had built his reputation in Sacramento. Irons and Stephens collaborated on several influential sets of flash, pairing Irons' bold illustrative cartoon line and use of negative space with Stephens' command of traditional layout, work that pushed American tattooing away from flat static designs toward fluid, dimensional artwork.
The collaboration ended in tragedy. In November 1984 a bus struck and killed Greg Irons in Bangkok. On Christmas Eve in 1986 Danny Danzl died in Seattle, closing a career of forty five years at the head of the shop. Pete Stephens took ownership. In 1999, by one account 2000, Stephens moved the Emporium from its Skid Row origins to 1508 Boren Avenue. In 2017 stewardship passed to James "Jimmy the Saint" and Romie de Hillary, who keep the shop running and maintain an on-site museum of Pacific Northwest tattooing and Danzl's foundational part in it.