| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Greg James |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | 8418 W. Sunset Blvd · West Hollywood |
| Date | 1985 CE |
| Style / Technique | Sunset Strip Southern California traditional and large-scale custom |
| Connected to | Cliff Raven, Good Time Charlie's Opens, Lyle Tuttle |
Archive Note
Gregory James was born December 18, 1954, in Chicago, Illinois, under the surname Schulthies. He came up in Southern California tattooing in the mid-1970s, brought into the trade by his older brother, Tennessee Dave James. James's own biography routes the entry through West Coast Tattoo and places the formal start of his apprenticeship under Tennessee Dave around 1976. The exact year is unsettled. Source variants run from late 1974 to a November 1975 professional start to 1976, so the safe frame is the mid-1970s rather than a single clean date.
Before his best documented years, James worked a Southern California shop trail that his official page and the older Bob Baxter and Vanishing Tattoo profile map across West Coast Tattoo, Hollywood Boulevard, the Long Beach Pike orbit, and Good Time Charlie's. These early stops are source-scoped and not yet pinned to exact dates. The firmer anchors in the record begin in the late 1980s, when James turns up in primary press as a working artist at one address on the Sunset Strip.
By one account James joined Sunset Strip Tattoo around 1985. Archived shop pages from 1998 place the studio at 8418 W. Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, list James on the staff, and preserve a 1997 biography under the shop's own domain. That archived bio says Cliff Raven hired James and names Robert Benedetti as Raven's partner, with Raven selling his interest to Benedetti after about a year. The careful reading is that Raven was a brief shop-floor employer and mentor, not a long formal teacher. James was already a working tattooer before he reached the Strip.
Primary press confirms the placement. A Mike Royko syndicated column printed in the News-Pilot on September 7, 1988, quotes James as a Sunset Strip Tattoo Studio voice. A January 13, 1989, profile of Robert Benedetti in the Daily Press and Los Angeles Times source family lists Greg James among Benedetti's Sunset Strip artists. The shop sat in the upstream Hollywood line that ran from the Lyle Tuttle family layer to Cliff Raven to Benedetti, though the exact ownership chronology of 8418 Sunset remains calibration-sensitive and is not settled here. James worked the Sunset Strip floor for more than twenty-five years.
The strongest publication credit in the record is bibliographic. Google Books and publisher metadata credit James as illustrator of Terisa Green's The Tattoo Encyclopedia: A Guide to Choosing Your Tattoo, published by Simon & Schuster in 2003. His official biography says he opened a shop of his own, Tattoos Deluxe, in Sherman Oaks in September 2012, at 4531 Van Nuys Boulevard, the former Subculture Tattoo location. That date rests on official self-publication until independent records surface.
Later James moved his practice east to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, at 1401 North Road Street, joining O'Mara Tattoo Studio. His son David James, full name David James Schulthies, tattoos there too and was himself apprenticed by Robert Benedetti around 1999, carrying the Sunset Strip hand forward a second generation. Feature lists and obituaries name a music and entertainment clientele, by their account including Ozzy Osbourne, members of Motley Crue, Joan Jett, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charlie Sheen, and Denise Richards, though the vault holds these as source-scoped rather than a settled roster.
Greg James died June 4, 2026, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, at seventy-one. The cause was not publicly stated. He carried one West Hollywood shop's traditional vocabulary across half a century of working and handed it to the next James at the chair.