| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Richard Stell |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Contemporary |
| Location | Deep Ellum, Dallas · Texas |
| Date | 1992 CE |
| Style / Technique | Texas Weird American Traditional, bright palette and bold outline with underground-comix and biker iconography |
| Connected to | Oliver Peck, Chris Trevino (Horimana), Don Ed Hardy |
Archive Note
Richard Stell founded Pair O' Dice Tattoo in the Deep Ellum Cultural Arts District of downtown Dallas in 1992 with his then-partner Deborah Brody, per the Tulsa Pair O' Dice shop's own published history page. The pre-1992 record is thin. Search summaries place him at Scorpion Studios in Houston by 1991, but no primary source confirms a residency there, and his apprenticeship master is undocumented in the sources reviewed. The Deep Ellum decade is where the record gets solid.
The Main Street shop ran roughly thirteen years. The Dallas Observer's "Pair O' Dice Lost" feature, published February 24, 2005, reported that Stell and Brody had been in Deep Ellum for a decade when their landlord raised the monthly rent from $1,500 to $3,500. That step-up came in spite of the shop's grandfathered status under the city's 1997 zoning ordinance, which had outlawed any new tattoo shops in the district. Stell and Brody closed the location and went to work at Fine Line Tattoo in Garland, Texas.
That shop was a training ground. Oliver Peck started hanging out at Pair O' Dice as a teenager, took a job and apprenticeship under Stell, and began tattooing professionally at age nineteen there, per the Dennis Kirk and Carl Hallowell biographical pieces. Peck went on to co-found Elm Street Tattoo, also in Deep Ellum, in 1996. Adrian Evans, later of Saints and Sinners Tattoo, names Stell as the artist from whom he learned most of what he knows, in both American and traditional Japanese-style registers. Carl Hallowell credits Stell with teaching him how to mix pigment and how to draw an eagle's tail correctly.
Stell's work sat in a register that later writing has labeled Texas Weird. Shawn Porter's Occult Vibrations piece "Texas Weird: Richard's Eyes," published July 27, 2017, characterized the cohort's look as "Traditional Americana with a healthy dose of underground comix and biker elements" and grouped Stell with Dave Lum and Chris Trevino as the originating set. A captioned 1994 photograph from the HeadOvMetal Flickr archive shows him working the San Diego Tattoo Convention alongside Lum and the videographer Michael O. Stearns. The same archive documents Stell as a recurring guest at the Star of Texas Tattoo Art Revival in Austin in 2009, 2010, and January 2011.
The last decade was hard. In May 2013, Tattoo Artist Magazine and the Last Sparrow Tattoo community coordinated a benefit after Stell suffered a heart attack and triple-bypass surgery. Around late 2015 to early 2016, a corrective eye surgery went wrong and, by the Occult Vibrations account, left him effectively blind in both eyes. Hallowell's published account says Stell kept drawing and instructing afterward, showing him how to draw an eagle's tail correctly even after he had gone blind.
Stell reopened Pair O' Dice in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2012, operating it with his wife Jennifer Stell, later anchored at 2921 South Harvard Avenue. He worked there until his death, recorded by the Last Sparrow Tattoo tribute thread as January 31, 2020, though no primary-source obituary fixing that date or the cause was located. Bert Krak has named Stell, with Mike Wilson and Bob Roberts, among his three all-time favorite tattooers, which places Stell inside the reference set of the post-2000 American Traditional revival. The Tulsa shop continues under Jennifer Stell.