| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Jeff P. (Jeff Pfeil) |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Contemporary |
| Location | Tattoo Smile, Ladd's Addition, Portland, Oregon, USA |
| Date | 1981 CE |
| Style / Technique | bold American traditional, heavy-outline flash |
| Connected to | Zac Scheinbaum, Seventh Son Tattoo, Lew Alberts |
Archive Note
Jeff P. learned to tattoo in New York City. The trade press records that much and little more, because he publishes under the short name "Jeff P." and has never put a full surname on his work. His teachers and the shops he came up in are not documented in available sources. What is documented starts at the end of 2009, when he left New York and moved across the country to Portland, Oregon, to take a chair at Art Work Rebels Tattoo Studio.
Art Work Rebels sat at the corner of Northwest 23rd Avenue and Glisan Street, in Portland's Nob Hill neighborhood. Jeff P. worked there for roughly seven years, building a bold American traditional practice and a flat file of hand-painted flash. He painted on watercolor boards, and that flat file was his primary design archive, the record of everything he had drawn and tattooed since coming west.
On the morning of October 19, 2016, that archive was gone in seconds. An excavation crew working nearby struck a natural gas line, and the gas reached the building and exploded. The blast leveled the structure, which also housed a bagel shop and an eyewear store, injured several people, and ran to millions of dollars in damage. A 2016 Willamette Week report documented the scene; a later jury award of 10.4 million dollars, reported by KATU, fixed the cause as the struck line. The site was sealed off for asbestos. Nothing inside could be recovered, and Jeff P.'s flat file of flash burned with it.
He did not let the work stay lost. Over the years after the fire he rebuilt the archive from old photographs and digital backups, reconstructing the pre-fire flash image by image. The result is a book,"Everything That Burned," published by Afterlife Press, with European distribution through Coenen Publishing. It reproduces the surviving images of that destroyed body of work and stands as the only record of it. Oregon Public Broadcasting covered the book on June 1, 2026, naming Jeff P. as the former Art Work Rebels artist behind it.
In 2020, four years after the explosion, Jeff P. opened his own shop. Tattoo Smile sits at 1990 Southeast Ladd Avenue, in the Ladd's Addition neighborhood of southeast Portland, and he opened it with two collaborators named Gordon and Manee. The shop covers a wide spread of styles, from American traditional through black and grey to Japanese, and Jeff P. is one of its co-owners. Their surnames, like his, are not established in the available record.
His own hand stays in the bold American traditional idiom, heavy outline and flat saturated color, the working tradition that runs back through the twentieth century to the Bowery and the Navy yards. Away from the machine he paints, too, large-scale psychedelic work on canvas that sits well outside the flash tradition. The trade facts hold up cleanly: the New York start, the 2009 move, the Art Work Rebels years, the 2016 explosion, the 2020 shop, and the book. The man behind them keeps his full name to himself, and the record, for now, lets him.