| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Jonathan Shaw |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | Fun City Tattoo, 94 St. Mark's Place · East Village, New York City |
| Date | 1976 CE |
| Style / Technique | Bold, heavy-handed Long Beach Pike American traditional |
| Connected to | Spider Webb, Bert Grimm, NYC Tattoo Ban |
Archive Note
Jonathan Shaw came up the hard way for a rich man's son. His father was Artie Shaw, the swing-era bandleader; his mother was the actress Doris Dowling, Shaw's seventh wife. The marriage fell apart when Jonathan was three, and he grew up in Los Angeles unstable and angry, with a heroin habit by his teens and a juvenile record to match. At nineteen, working at the Los Angeles Free Press, he met Charles Bukowski.
Bukowski told him to live the book before he wrote it. Shaw took it literally. Around 1972 he hitchhiked from Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro, worked as a deckhand, and started tattooing with handmade machines. Back in the States he apprenticed under Bob Shaw, no relation, at Bert Grimm's tattoo studio on the Long Beach Pike, where he learned the bold, thick, heavy-handed Pike style that anchored his hand for the rest of his life. He worked beside Colonel Bill Todd, Zeke Owens, and later Filip Leu.
Then he came back to New York, a city where tattooing had been illegal since 1961. He put in a stretch at Spider Webb's studio, and in 1976 opened his own shop in a basement off the Bowery. That underground room is the start of Fun City Tattoo, now the oldest tattoo shop in Manhattan. For twenty-one years he ran it outside the law, one of the small handful of tattooers who kept the craft alive inside the city during the ban.
He brought it into the light slowly. A storefront on Macdougal Street in the mid-1980s, then the move in 1989 to 94 St. Mark's Place, where Fun City has stood ever since. The shop became the East Village's loudest tattoo address, a place where Johnny Depp, Iggy Pop, Kate Moss, Tupac Shakur, Marilyn Manson, and the Ramones all sat down. Shaw was the first tattooer to appear on Letterman, and the only one whose face Art Spiegelman ever drew for the cover of The New Yorker.
In 1991 he founded International Tattoo Art, widely called the first magazine devoted entirely to tattooing, and ran it as managing editor. He trained Big Steve Pedone, who joined as a shop kid in 2001 and now owns Fun City. The chain runs clean from Bert Grimm to Bob Shaw to Jonathan Shaw to Pedone, the Long Beach Pike carried across the country into the East Village.
After twenty-eight years of tattooing, Shaw quit the chair in 2004, sold Fun City, and moved back to Rio, the city he calls his true home. He turned to writing full-time. His novel Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes came out in 2008 and was reissued by Johnny Depp's imprint in 2015. His memoir Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist, with a cover by R. Crumb, followed in 2017, and a documentary of the same name records the whole strange arc. Iggy Pop called him "the great nightmare anti-hero of the new age."