Archive Note
Horitoku is regarded in the tattoo press and in documentary coverage as a leading horishi working in tebori, the hand method of Japanese tattooing, and is noted as much for craft and scholarship as for media presence. He is repeatedly described as having searched the secondhand bookshops of the Kanda district for original Edo-period prints and books by masters such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi in order to reproduce the traditional iconographic vocabulary faithfully, and he frames the craft as cultural preservation reaching back to the Edo period. He has trained more than twenty assistants over his career, the best documented being the tebori artist Horishige, and his clients' work has been photographed for the major tattoo exhibition at the quai Branly Museum in Paris. Whether he is properly styled Horitoku I, the first of a named line, is not established.
Lineage
No live Atlas connections are listed yet.