| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Lou Rubino Sr (Tattoo Lou) |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | Selden · Long Island, New York |
| Date | 1958 CE |
| Style / Technique | New York American traditional, Coney Island sidewalk-booth craft carried into a Long Island storefront chain |
| Connected to | Stanley "Bowery Stan" Moskowitz, NYC Tattoo Ban, Charlie Wagner |
Archive Note
Lou Rubino Sr was born and raised in Brooklyn and, by his own account in The Aquarian in 2008, knew he was meant to tattoo by the time he was fourteen. At that age he started hanging around Coney Island and watching One Eyed Max Peltz work a sidewalk tattoo booth on Stillwell Avenue. He got his first tattoo at that booth. Then he made himself useful.
The arrangement was labor for knowledge. Rubino drew flash, cut stencils, built needles, and made machines for Peltz, and in return the older tattooer taught him the trade. A walk-up curbside booth was a far more open school than the closed shops of the Bowery and Chatham Square, and Rubino's account, corroborated across The Aquarian, Tattoo Life, Freshly Inked, Patch, and the Coney Island History Project, is the clearest documented case of how craft passed through that Stillwell Avenue scene. After Peltz he came back to Coney Island to work alongside Brooklyn Blackie, a second footing in the same cluster, this time inside a brick-and-mortar storefront rather than at a curb.
By the mid to late 1950s he had moved to Manhattan and partnered with Professor Dominic Chance to open the Garden Tattoo Shop, across from the old Madison Square Garden at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, the building that stood from 1925 to 1968. The shop sat in the last full pre-ban window of New York City commercial tattooing, the same late-1950s moment as Charlie Wagner's final years and the Moskowitz family's Bowery chair. Chance's own record is thin, and his particulars past the Garden Tattoo Shop are unrecorded in the vault.
In 1958 Rubino opened the first Tattoo Lou's in Selden, in Suffolk County on Long Island, at 262 Middle Country Road. By the account in The Aquarian, the only other shop in the county at the time belonged to the Moskowitz brothers, Stanley and Walter, the men he called the Bowery Boys. Rubino set up roughly thirty-five miles from theirs, in his telling out of respect for their business. The vault flags a date question here. The Aquarian places the Moskowitz Amityville shop as already running in 1958, while the Moskowitz entries date it to about 1962 to 1963, so the gesture is best read as a working-trade courtesy of geographic spacing rather than a settled timeline.
The timing of the Selden shop mattered more than Rubino could have planned. On November 1, 1961, New York City banned commercial tattooing after a Coney Island hepatitis outbreak, and every shop in the five boroughs closed. Selden sat outside the city in Suffolk County, untouched by the code, with Long Island Expressway access and a walk-in trade. For the full span of the ban, customers from the metropolitan area who wanted work had to leave the city, and a good share of that displaced demand had somewhere close to go.
From the Selden seed grew the Tattoo Lou's chain, with shops over the decades in Huntington, Saint James, West Babylon, Deer Park, and a Bay Shore Mall location. His son Lou Rubino Jr learned the trade from him and carried the name forward, founding Ultimate Tattoo Supply and, in 2012, the pigment line World Famous Tattoo Ink. That makes for an unusually long thread in American tattooing, running from a 1940s Coney Island curb to a national pigment maker.
Rubino Sr's birth year and death year are not in the surfaced record, though sources confirm he has died, and the canonical spelling of the surname is Rubino. What is firmly documented is the shape of the career. He took the open craft of a Coney Island sidewalk booth, carried it through a Manhattan storefront, and built it into the first lasting tattoo institution on Long Island.