Archive Note
Deutsche grew up in Detroit and left for San Diego, where he got his start, then spent roughly three and a half months in Florida living with Paul Rogers and learning machine building from the inside, a method Rogers had condensed from Cap Coleman, making Deutsche one of the documented late transmissions of that iron-building knowledge. He cites Ed Hardy, Greg Irons, Bob Roberts, and Dan Higgs as influences, moved to San Francisco to work at Hardy's Realistic, and helped Hardy and Freddy Corbin open Tattoo City, one of the central American custom-tattoo institutions of the 1990s. His tattooing fuses Borneo skulls, Japanese water, and Polynesian tribal forms in single compositions built for legibility at a distance, using deliberate breaks for breathing room, and he spent roughly a decade working entirely freehand without stencils, drawing directly on the body. He now works at Three Kings Tattoo in Los Angeles.