Archive Note
Sid Diller received his first tattoos and piercings while serving in the United States Coast Guard during the Second World War, and ran the Silver Anchor tattoo studio in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From that base he corresponded and exchanged material with the small, mostly West Coast piercing community around Doug Malloy and Jim Ward, becoming an important East Coast and Southern node in that story. His lasting significance is as a documentarian: he kept meticulous records, including hundreds of labeled Polaroids, film, and ephemera, that became the ten-volume Sailor Sid Diller Piercing Collection covering roughly 1975 to 1984. He died in 1990, his collection passed to Jim Ward, founder of Gauntlet, and Ward donated it to the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago in 1997. His full legal name, birth year, and birthplace are not on record.
Lineage
No live Atlas connections are listed yet.