Archive Note
Born in 1967 in Boonton, New Jersey, Booth began tattooing through a traditional East Coast apprenticeship under Ernie White at the Tattoo Factory in Butler, New Jersey, paying about $5,000 and starting on Halloween, October 31, 1988. He opened Last Rites Tattoo Theatre in New York City in 1998, after the 1997 repeal of the NYC tattoo ban, and built it over the following two decades into the era's defining venue for black-and-grey horror work, demons, monsters, dark religious and occult imagery, and surrealist Boschian compositions rendered at back-piece and bodysuit scale. Rolling Stone crowned him "The New King of Rock Tattoos" in a February 2002 feature, and his client base included members of Slipknot, Slayer, Pantera, and many other metal bands. He was the first tattoo artist accepted into the National Arts Club, by October 2006, and in 2000 he co-founded the charitable ArtFusion Experiment with Filip and Titine Leu. Last Rites closed in May 2020 during the pandemic, and Booth moved to a private studio in New Jersey. He is best described as the principal originating anchor of the dark-realism register at scale rather than its sole inventor.