| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Percy Waters |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Early Modern |
| Location | Detroit · Michigan |
| Date | 1929 CE |
| Style / Technique | American traditional flash and mail-order supply, electromagnetic machine manufacturing |
| Connected to | Bob Shaw, Samuel O'Reilly, Charlie Wagner |
Archive Note
Percy Waters was born in 1888 and worked the trade from the early 1910s until his death in 1952. He tattooed in Anniston, Alabama, before relocating to Detroit, Michigan, where he was active through the 1920s and 1930s. Detroit is where the part of his career that matters most was built. He left in 1939, returned home to Anniston, and ran his supply business there until he died in 1952.
Waters matters less for the marks he made on skin than for the machine he put in other tattooers' hands. On August 13, 1929, he secured U.S. Patent 1,724,812, the "Electric tattooing device," filed as application US336219A on January 30, 1929, of Detroit, Michigan. The USPTO primary document, US1724812A, verifies the design. It was the first modern electromagnetic machine to carry a convenient finger-operated toggle switch, and it set the template for how the equipment would be built for decades.
The patent text is specific. It specifies an L-shaped malleable-iron frame carrying a pair of upright electromagnets, with the switch built into a molded rubber sleeve on the barrel that doubled as both grip insulator and switch housing. It documents three needle configurations: a cluster for outlining, a tool-steel point for engraving, and a cluster of fine needles for shading or filling color. There is a sheet-metal spark shield, and power could come either from a dry-cell battery or from a transformer wired into a house circuit. Waters framed the device as cross-applicable to human tattooing, to marking the ear of a fur animal, and to electro-engraving.
The larger work was the supply house. From Detroit, Waters published extensive catalogs of flash sheets and technical supplies and mailed them to professional and amateur practitioners worldwide. That distribution did something no single shop could. It standardized the design vocabulary and the equipment of the trade at scale, pushing the same machines, the same flash, and the same parts out to working tattooers across the country and beyond. Through it, tattooing moved from a localized folk craft toward a standardized global industry.
The reach shows in who came up around him. Waters was a central supplier and mentor to many mid-century traditional practitioners, including Bob Shaw, and his catalogs shaped the design vocabulary of what became the Detroit cohort of tattooers. The machine he patented stood in the line that ran from Samuel O'Reilly's 1891 electric-machine patent forward into the modern electromagnetic builds, the next major standardizing step after O'Reilly's.
Waters worked another twenty-odd years after the patent, back in Anniston, supplying the trade until 1952. The plain measure of him is durability of design. The frame layout, the dual-electromagnet build, and the integrated switch he documented in 1929 became the working shape of the American tattoo machine, and the catalog model he ran out of Detroit became the way the trade equipped itself. He is one of the figures who built the infrastructure the twentieth-century trade ran on.