Archive Note
Corbin grew up in the Bay Area, apprenticed under a tattooer he names as Erno, and worked alongside Don Ed Hardy and Eddy Deutsche during the formative period of Tattoo City in San Francisco, with Dan Higgs cited as another influence. By his own account a period of addiction during the Tattoo City years led to a departure to Amsterdam, where he lived in the Red Light District before getting clean and returning to the East Bay. He opened Temple Tattoo in Oakland in 1998, deliberately choosing a gritty downtown location, and opened Tattoo 13 about eighteen months later. His work fuses East Los Angeles black-and-grey, Old English lettering, and explicit Catholic iconography executed at speed on a coil machine, and with Scott Sylvia he is credited as a popularizer, not the inventor, of the Day of the Dead sugar skull as a tattoo subject. He has framed the craft as spiritual practice across cultures.