Archive Note
Grime, whose legal name is Brett Grimmelbein, grew up in the Fruita area of western Colorado as a skateboarder, an experience that fed the smoke and texture effects in his style, and survived a serious childhood burn at age eight that his peers and his own interviews tie to the relentless pace and perfectionism of his work. He entered the trade in San Francisco in the 1990s under Don Ed Hardy and Marcus Pacheco, then founded the appointment-only studio Skull and Sword, where he worked alongside artists including Yutaro Sakai and Henry Lewis; after it closed in the late 2010s his projects moved to Seventh Son Tattoo. His instantly recognizable style recombines traditional Americana and Japanese compositional logic with biomechanical surrealism and saturated neon color, and the acknowledgments in his self-published monograph Iron Will thank Horiyoshi III, Horitomo, and Takahiro Kitamura, naming the Japanese-master influence directly. He is the author of an earlier visual diary, Two Year Autopsy, and is a distinct individual from the biomechanical tattooer Aaron Cain, with whom trade references sometimes confuse him.