Tatts Thomas

Archive Note

Gilbert McCalop Thomas III was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 13, 1901. By his own account he showed early drawing talent and left home at fourteen, around 1915, attaching himself to traveling circus and carnival outfits. That itinerant entertainment world fed most early twentieth century American tattooers. His needle name,"Tatts," was given to him while he was on the Ringling Show in 1917, and he began on the midway as a tattooed attraction who became a practitioner, the standard route into the trade in that period.

He settled in Chicago no later than the 1920s and worked South State Street, the city's penny-arcade and burlesque strip in what is now the South Loop, for the rest of his life there. His long partner was Ralph Ernest Johnstone (1904 to 1960), a tattooer and sideshow banner painter. Their documented shops clustered on or just off State Street: 414 South State, 430 South State (the Hollywood Arcade), 600 South State, and 13 West Harrison. Johnstone painted much of the flash that circulated under both their names, and period press routinely credited his paintings to Thomas.

Thomas is the documented teacher of Sailor Jerry. In the late 1920s the teenage Norman Keith Collins arrived in Chicago and Thomas taught him the mechanics of an electric tattoo machine. Standard accounts, drawn from Don Ed Hardy's 2013 book "Wear Your Dreams" and the Tattoo Archive, describe Collins practicing on intoxicated subjects pulled in from the surrounding Skid Row blocks. This is the most cited training event in the early biography of Sailor Jerry and the documented entry point of machine tattooing into what became the Honolulu lineage. The careful framing, per Hardy and Sailor Jerry Ltd. materials, is that Thomas gave Collins his first machine instruction. Collins then continued through the East Coast sailor milieu before settling in Honolulu by the late 1930s. The popular claim that Thomas was Collins's only teacher is folkloric.

Many of Thomas's Chicago clients were sailors from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station north of the city, the same recruit pipeline that later defined Samuel Steward's Phil Sparrow shop on the same street. Steward is documented as having received his first tattoo from Thomas, a detail that sits behind Steward's choice to open his own State Street parlor. The strip sat at the meeting point of three client streams: Navy recruits, traveling carnival workers, and the working-class Loop.

In the early 1960s Chicago raised the legal tattooing age to twenty-one and most State Street tattooers left town. Thomas held on. Late in the decade he is documented working at 900 West Belmont with the young Cliff Raven (Clifford H. Ingram), and in Milwaukee at 304 West Wells Street alongside Amund Dietzel, the "Master of Milwaukee," and in Kenosha at 5108 6th Avenue with Greg May. A widely circulated Associated Press wire photograph from February 11, 1967, shows Thomas in his Milwaukee parlor reflecting on fifty years in the trade as the city moved toward its June 30, 1967 tattooing ban.

He died on June 1, 1969. By one account he visited Collins in Honolulu earlier that same year, though that visit rests on a single chain of secondary sources and is not independently confirmed. Two attributions sometimes attached to him do not hold up: the surname "Vetter" does not appear in any reputable source consulted, and the identification with a Chicago "Professor Thomas" is disputed and likely a confusion with Phil Sparrow, the literature professor who became a tattooer.

Thomas began as a circus tattooed man in 1917, when sideshow attractions were still a primary economic structure of American tattooing, and worked through to the 1960s, when Cliff Raven and the early Renaissance generation were already moving. Few documented careers span that full transition. He is the through-line connecting the South State Street arcade culture of the 1920s to the postwar Hawaiʻi lineage and the Chicago shop generation around Phil Sparrow and Cliff Raven.

Lineage