| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Justin Weatherholtz |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Contemporary |
| Location | Good Luck NYC, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York, USA |
| Date | 1999 CE |
| Style / Technique | Contemporary American tattooing with death-and-water painting; Kings Avenue / Good Luck NYC lineage |
| Connected to | Greg Irons, Dr. Woo (Brian Woo), Kiku |
Archive Note
Justin Weatherholtz grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, and played in a band before he got his first tattoo in 1997. He did not pick up the machine right away. He began tattooing in 1999 in Reading under his mentor Joe Johns, who ran Wizards World of Tattoos in the same city. That apprenticeship under Johns is the documented start of his career, recorded on his own About page.
The training started on fruit. Before Johns let him work on people, Weatherholtz practiced his early applications on three oranges. He stayed in Reading under Johns and built the foundation there. When the chance came, he moved to New York and joined Kings Avenue Tattoo, the studio founded by Mike Rubendall. By his own account on the BOOKS CLOSED Podcast he was wary of leaving but took the call. "I wanted like warm weather," he said,"I got the call and I was like well I'm not gonna not do this."
He has tattooed at Kings Avenue for over twelve years. He also works at Good Luck NYC, the Greenpoint shop at 68 Greenpoint Avenue in Brooklyn, identified there as his second chair in a January 2022 account in the neighborhood paper Greenpointers. Sometimes called the melon man, he carries the orange-practice story in the nickname.
Weatherholtz never left Reading behind. Together with Joe Johns he co-produces the annual Pagoda City Tattoo Fest, held the first weekend of August in Reading, Pennsylvania. The convention ties the New York chair back to the Pennsylvania shop where he learned the trade, and keeps mentor and student working the same event year after year.
His painting runs on a recurring set of themes: death, mortality, and water. In late January 2022 Afterlife Press published Death at Sea, a large-format softcover collecting twenty-five original paintings on those subjects. He marked the release with a book event at Saint Vitus in Brooklyn on January 27, 2022. He found a key influence close to home, discovering the work of Greg Irons, a fellow Pennsylvanian, through colleagues at Kings Avenue Tattoo.
He has also taken a public position on amateur tattooing. He joined an undercover visit to a Brooklyn outfit billed as the FIB Tattoo Bar to inspect its controversial amateur-tattooing curriculum, a trip he discussed on the BOOKS CLOSED Podcast episode on disruptive tattooing with the podcaster Andrew Stortz. The same podcast circle put him in conversation about figures like the Los Angeles tattooer Doctor Woo.
Weatherholtz frames his openness about the trade in his own words. "Why should I ever deny anybody something that's brought so much to me," he said,"I was like it's the most hypocritical thing ever." The line from a Reading band kid practicing on oranges in 1999 to a twelve-year Kings Avenue chair and a published book of death-and-water paintings runs through one mentor, Joe Johns, and one convention the two of them still run together.