| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Stoney St. Clair |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Early Modern |
| Location | Columbus · Ohio |
| Date | 1928 CE |
| Style / Technique | American traditional sideshow and carnival flash |
| Connected to | August "Cap" Coleman, Charlie Wagner, Don Ed Hardy |
Archive Note
Leonard L. St. Clair was born in 1912 in Bluefield, West Virginia, to a coal-mining family. At age four he contracted what published sources most often call rheumatoid arthritis, sometimes rheumatic fever. His father spent the family savings on long treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where the boy first took up drawing. Stoney used a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and his growth was stunted.
The carnival took him before the trade did. At fifteen, in 1927, he joined the sideshow of the Cole Brothers Circus as a sword-swallower. In 1928, while the circus played Norfolk, Virginia, he visited the East Main Street tattoo district, the same Norfolk strip where August "Cap" Coleman is documented running shops from 1918 onward. Accounts differ on exactly how he got his first equipment. One version has the resident tattooer handing over surplus gear when the circus left town. The 1928 starting date and the Norfolk and Coleman setting hold across reputable sources, and "tattooing since 1928" is the date Stoney himself used on the title page of his book.
For the next half-century he worked itinerantly with circuses and carnivals, with documented stops that included Little Rock, Miami, Hopkinsville in Kentucky, Havana, and Puerto Rico. The circus wintered in Tampa, Florida, and he opened his first standing shop there in 1936. He ran a shop in Biloxi, Mississippi, from 1950 to 1957, the period that produced much of the surviving hand-painted flash. His final and best-documented shop ran in Columbus, Ohio, from 1970 until his death in 1980, on High Street in the area now called the Short North. The sign read "Stoney Knows How: Tattooing by the Teacher of the Art," the line that titled both his book and his film.
That work survived him as physical objects. A near-complete corpus of his hand-painted flash from the Biloxi and Columbus years, with stencils, machines, and shop ephemera, was acquired from a St. Clair relative by the Columbus collector Joey Knuckles. It has been published as the multi-volume "Stoney" St. Clair Rediscovered Flash series. It is the principal known surviving cache of his hand.
What made Stoney distinct was the documentation. The folklorist Alan B. Govenar transcribed and edited his spoken life history into Stoney Knows How: Life as a Tattoo Artist, published by the University Press of Kentucky in February 1981 and reissued by Schiffer Publishing in 2003 and 2023. It is the most thorough first-person book ever published on a mid-twentieth-century American carnival tattooer. The companion documentary, Stoney Knows How (1981, 29 minutes), was directed by Govenar and Pacho Lane with cinematography by Les Blank. It captures Stoney at work in Columbus, including his freehand tattooing of Don Ed Hardy, a rat in a top hat on Hardy's leg. Vincent Canby reviewed the film in the New York Times on November 11, 1981.
His career is the documented bridge. The arc ran from the Norfolk street shops of Cap Coleman and Charlie Wagner, the late-1920s East Coast world, into the late-1970s Renaissance generation around Hardy. The on-camera Hardy tattoo is the most-cited single point of that generational handoff, one working man passing the trade forward on film.
Several louder claims do not hold. The Lawrenceburg, Indiana birthplace is refuted by Bluefield records. A juvenile-reformatory origin for his craft, a tenure with the "Texas Kid" Frank Crouch, a New Orleans period, and a Smithsonian placement of his material are all unverified in the published sources surveyed. The core arc, West Virginia to Tampa to Biloxi to Columbus, the 1928 Coleman start, the 1981 book and film, is verified across multiple independent sources.