| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Tattoo Lucky (Gregersen) |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | Rua Joao Otavio · Santos |
| Date | 1959 CE |
| Style / Technique | maritime American traditional port-city flash |
| Connected to | The Sailor Tattoo Tradition, Mexico City Underground (Tianguis del Chopo), Tattoo Peter (Pier de Haan) |
Archive Note
Knud Harald Lykke Gregersen was born May 14, 1928, in Frederiksberg, a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark. He grew up near the sea and went to work as a sailor. On his voyages he picked up maritime illustration, the flash vocabulary of anchors and dragons that traveled with deep-water crews. He went by Tattoo Lucky.
On July 20, 1959, Gregersen stepped off a vessel at the Port of Santos, in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He brought an electric tattoo machine from Europe with him. By the HIGH-confidence record kept by Brazilian guilds, that machine was the first electric tattoo machine to work in the country, and the date is now marked locally as the Day of the Professional Practitioner.
He set up shop that same July at Rua Joao Otavio, number 2, in Santos. As the business grew he moved it to Rua General Camara, a busier street in the same port city. The Santos shop ran continuously from July 1959 to 1983. In the early years, from 1959 to 1969, his customers were the men the port produced, foreign sailors off the docks, dockworkers, and waterfront bohemians. He hung a sign in English telling sailors they were not complete without proper work on the skin.
The clientele changed in the 1970s. Tourists, counterculture youth, and surfers started coming through the door. In 1974 a young surfer from Rio de Janeiro named Jose Artur Machado, called Petit, came into the Santos shop for a stylized dragon. Machado later became the subject of Caetano Veloso's 1979 song "Menino do Rio," and that connection carried Gregersen's work out of the port district and into the wider Brazilian public. The same shop that had marked foreign crews off the docks was now marking the beach kids of the Brazilian coast, and the social distance between those two groups of customers narrowed across his counter.
Gregersen married a Brazilian woman and raised two children in the country, Erna and George Frederik. Both took up the craft and carried his work forward. A robbery and security trouble at the Santos shop in the early 1980s pushed him to look for somewhere quieter. He moved first to Itanhaem on the Sao Paulo coast, then north to the state of Rio de Janeiro.
He settled in the coastal town of Arraial do Cabo, where he kept painting and tattooing on a smaller scale. It was there, on December 17, 1983, that Gregersen died of a heart attack at fifty five. He had run one port-city shop for the better part of a quarter century.
The importance is plain in the dates. Gregersen carried the maritime flash tradition out of Copenhagen and planted it in a South American port, and the electric machine he brought ashore at Santos in July 1959 opened professional electric tattooing in Brazil. The line did not stop with him. His children kept the work going, and the July 20 arrival date is still observed in the country he changed.
Gregersen did not pick the craft up at sea. He learned it at home. His father, Jens Gregersen, was a known Danish tattooer working in Copenhagen through the 1930s and 1940s, and is said to have tattooed the King of Denmark. The son took the trade from him. At fifteen Gregersen left the family home in Copenhagen and went traveling, carrying that skill across a long string of countries before he ever reached the Port of Santos in July 1959. The sailor framing came later, from the dockside clientele he built in Brazil. The hand was his father's.
The work outlived him in two ways. His son George Frederik Gregersen, called Fred and himself a tattooer, has kept the family shop and its records, holding the Santos story together for the people who trace the trade back to it. And the arrival date became a marker on the Brazilian calendar. Reportedly set in 2007 by the Sao Paulo tattooers and piercers union SETAP-SP, July 20, the day Gregersen stepped off at the Port of Santos in 1959, is now observed across the country as Brazil's National Tattoo Artist Day. The career itself ran the coast south to north. Santos first, then Suarao in Itanhaem on the Sao Paulo shore, and finally Arraial do Cabo in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where he died on December 17, 1983.