| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Eli Quinters |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Contemporary |
| Location | 411 Smith Street · Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn |
| Date | 2008 CE |
| Style / Technique | American traditional, classical flash |
| Connected to | Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins, Bert Grimm, Don Ed Hardy |
Archive Note
Eli Quinters was raised in Utah. He moved to New York City in 1997, and by 2000 he had started tattooing while attending the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Before he settled into one shop he worked across the city, taking chairs in NYC, Brooklyn, Queens, and out on Long Island. The Raking Light Projects bio that carries his early history places him inside the small, dense circle of New York traditionalists who came up after the city legalized tattooing in 1997.
In the summer of 2008, Quinters joined Bert Krak, Steve Boltz, and Dan Santoro at 411 Smith Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, the address that became Smith Street Tattoo Parlour. The four of them built the most visible American shop of the post-millennium traditional revival. Who exactly holds the title of founder is contested in the record. By one account, Krak's group interview with Acclaim Magazine, the summer-2008 opening trio was Krak, Boltz, and Quinters, with Santoro joining shortly after. By another, RVCA's brand copy names only Krak and Boltz. GQ's 2020 feature captions the pair "along with Eli Quinters" as cofounders, and Raking Light Projects says he was invited to the shop in 2008 alongside the other three. The four-cofounder phrasing is the most widely repeated in marketing and documentary press. The institutional fact that holds across every account is simpler. Quinters was on the Smith Street floor as a core resident from the start.
His hand within the shop vocabulary was the classical flash piece. Smith Street built its house look on heavy black outlines and a limited traditional palette of red, green, yellow, and brown, with iconography pulled straight from the Sailor Jerry, Bert Grimm, Cap Coleman, and Mike Malone source set. Eagles, daggers, panthers, roses, pin-ups, ships. Each of the four residents kept a distinguishable hand inside that shared vocabulary, and Quinters worked the classical flash designs.
The clearest statement of his approach is a single recorded line. In the VICE series Tattoo Age, filmed on the Smith Street shop floor for the two-part profile of Dan Santoro, Quinters compressed the whole shop doctrine into one sentence. "We want our tattoos to look like tattoos." The line reads as the anti-novelty position of the shop, set against the Acclaim group-interview material on aging well, holding a classic palette, and still reading clean decades after the work goes on. It is the tightest articulation in the record of why the shop kept returning to the same old source flash rather than chasing the new.
The work itself reached print under his name in 2009 to 2011. Quinters is one of the four credited authors of Smith Street Tattoo Parlour: Tattoo Flash 2009 to 2011, a 28-page full-color spiral-bound flash book that documents the early Smith Street lineup and circulated through tattooflashbooks.com and Gentlemans Tattoo Flash before going out of print. Alongside the shop's heavy presence in Tattoo Age across 2017 to 2018, the book is part of how a local Brooklyn parlor became a globally cited reference for traditional tattooing.
The biographical record on Quinters past Smith Street is thin. The Raking Light Projects bio is concise, and independent depth beyond it has not surfaced in available sources, which carry his entry at MIXED confidence. What is durable is his place on the Smith Street roster. He is one of the four hands, and the recorded source-voices, who set the shop's unified look and carried the New York traditional idiom into the 2010s.