Tattoo Peter (Pier de Haan)

Archive Note

Pier de Haan was born on 13 July 1925 in Sneek, the Frisian capital on the IJsselmeer, and grew up in the North Sea fishing port of IJmuiden. He worked as a fisherman as a young man, and by the shop's own account he first picked up the tattoo machine through the seaman-to-seaman tradition aboard fishing boats. During the Second World War he lost his lower leg and wore a prosthesis for the rest of his life. The specific mechanism is recorded as a mine accident across the shop history, the Tattoo Archive, and Historiek.net, but no primary war record has surfaced, so by one account it was a mine. The leg loss itself is visible in the surviving photographs of him at work.

The formative encounter of his working life was with Albert Cornelissen, the Rotterdam tattooer working from 36A Veerlaan in the Katendrecht harbour quarter from 1953. Cornelissen had been a sailor for two decades, had learned the trade aboard ship, and was the first post-WWII tattooer in the Netherlands. Big Tattoo Planet's Katendrecht history records that Peter met Cornelissen and learned a thing or two from him, and the Cornelissen to de Haan link is the verifiable primary lineage chain of mid-century Dutch tattooing. By the early 1950s Peter was tattooing with a battery-powered machine in harbourside cafes, and he travelled to Denmark and Germany to pick up further craft from the Northern European port-tattoo network.

In 1955 he opened Tattoo Peter in the basement under Cafe Emil's Place at Sint Olofssteeg 4, in Amsterdam's red-light district. This is the first post-WWII dedicated tattoo shop in Amsterdam, documented by the Amsterdam City Archive photograph "Tattoo Peter aan het werk, Sint Olofssteeg." The older framing of "first in the Netherlands" is overbroad. Willem Meester ran a pre-WWII Amsterdam shop around 1908 to 1915, and Cornelissen's Rotterdam shop predates Amsterdam by two years. The strongest verified claim is first post-WWII shop in Amsterdam. In 1977 Peter moved the operation to Nieuwe Brugsteeg 28, near Centraal Station, where it still stands.

For nearly two decades, through the late 1950s, the 1960s, and into the early 1970s, Peter was effectively the only working tattooer in Amsterdam, and his shop was the city's only link to the wider European port-tattoo network. His clientele was overwhelmingly merchant and naval sailors and fishermen, and his working register was bold-line, solid-color American-traditional iconography, rocks of ages, anchors, ships, swallows, and hearts. Per the Tattoo Archive and a Tattoo Club of America newsletter of October 1964, he was admitted to Les Skuse's Bristol Tattoo Club on 14 November 1960, recorded as the first Dutch tattooer in the club, and took a working spell at Tattoo Ole in Copenhagen in 1961. Both claims trace to that single newsletter and are best read as single-source.

The relationship that connects Peter to the broader European Tattoo Renaissance is his time with Henk Schiffmacher. From 1975 to 1978 Schiffmacher, then an art-school student and a display worker at the De Bijenkorf department store, visited the Sint Olofssteeg basement on his lunch breaks every working day, photographing Peter and his clients. Schiffmacher has consistently described Peter as the man who introduced him to tattooing, while saying he was substantially self-taught once he had a machine of his own. The strong-form claim that Schiffmacher trained under Peter is disputed. The catalytic-friendship and observational-mentorship form is the one the sources support.

Pier de Haan died of a brain tumor on 17 March 1984, aged 58. The shop continued without interruption under his stepson Eddy Wertwijn, born 27 September 1962 in Diemen, who had started tattooing there in September 1980. The colloquial "Peter's son" framing on the shop history page is the stepson relationship in working register, per the locked correction adopting DIMS Amsterdam. The continuous operation of the shop from 1955 to today is Peter's real contribution to the record. It is the institutional spine that carried Dutch tattooing from the Cornelissen and Katendrecht port trade to the post-1980 Amsterdam scene. In 2005 the Amsterdam Historisch Museum, now Museum H'ART, staged "Zeemanstatoeages," built around a physical reconstruction of Peter's Sint Olofssteeg shop, on Schiffmacher's initiative.

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